Frog on a Lotus Leaf, Hammer-formed Brass

I made this sculpture for my daughter Stephanie’s 27th birthday. When she was little she would spend hours trying to catch frogs at the edge of our pond. When we arrived at Stephanie’s house for her birthday celebration, her daughter, age three, greeted us, all excited, showing us a toad she had in her hand!

I wanted to make this out of one piece, and since I had never done anything quite like it before, I was not sure if it would even work. It turned out to not be all that difficult, although I had to make some new tools to do it. It started out with raising on a stake, like making an off-center bowl shape. The first four pictures show that part of the process.

It was looking a lot like a hat, which made me think about making a real hat, but I digress. the frog details were mostly pushed out from the inside, using a sand bag for backup, then refined further from the outside. I would have liked the nose to be longer, but the metal was getting dangerously thin, so it had to stop there.

The pictures of the finished piece were taken with my new Nikon D60 camera, which I’m still trying to learn how to use.

Tagged as: brass, frog sculpture, hammer-formed, handcrafted, metal art, metal craft, metalsmith, metalsmithing, sculpture, shelbyvision, steve shelby, tools