the details behind octessence

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Although the octos and tridents were designed first, I had to begin by fabricating the frame on which everything mounts. 

The entire piece is 60" wide and about 6' tall - the frame needed to be stout to support the octos, shafts, and tridents (and itself).

The arms and bodies were freehand drawn as the final design, and then each was scaled up and transferred to metal, and then freehand plasma cut from 16ga steel.  Enjoy the Christmas music in the background...

All pieces of the arms and bodies (including the eyes and gills) were freehand cut using a plasma cutter.

 All edges of all pieces needed to be smoothed, often by hand due to the shapes.

There is actually a cool sub-framing I designed so the octos are self-supporting on the main frame. This required welding of the framing to the backs of each octos so they can mount to the tridents, and each other.

The main trident bodies are from raw aluminum stock, which I cut from larger stock as I worked through the design and proportions.

After cutting the stock, all of the trident work was machining work. The aluminum was machined on the mill.

The brass trident elements were all turned on the lathe.

I was very happy with the design, size and proportion of these tridents and how they complemented the rest of the piece. I have more designs that I really like, and I'm considering making full tridents as independent pieces for sale. These are pretty beefy - I estimate about 5lbs each.

I had to iterate on the height for the right look. Here I'm trying to sight it in with the partially assembled octos and frame.

 The first rough draft of all the elements together.

As I mentioned - this piece is BIG, and HEAVY. I needed to do some trial runs of it fully assembled and vertical - some shakedown runs to see if there were any parts under stress under its own weight.

And then yet-another-final test setup. Here you can see the tridents have only been assembled and are not polished or even aligned.

After adjustments and notes made, it all gets disassembled for final metal prep.

There are many steps in preparing for paint.

Each octo (body + arms) consumed approximately 3 hours each for paint prep.

Each received several coats of paint.

During the drying times for all the octo pieces and frame, the trident heads and eyes/gills were polished.

Then on to … yet another… final assembly. Do not fret - the octo wore her seatbelt.

This was the first snap of the finished piece after I stepped back to look at it for the first time after installation. Although just a quick snap, I really like how this pic captures the contrast between the aluminum vs. brass eyes and gills.

I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough with me. I'm very proud of this piece, and learned a lot from creating it. It was truly a pleasure to conceive the idea, design it, fabricate it, and actually see it come to life and capture the original vision.