Mold Making

Every great bronze begins with a great mold. At Artisan Bronze, mold making is where your sculpture's journey into metal truly starts — and it's a craft we've been trusted with by contemporary artists and sculptors for over 30 years.

We use GI-1000 Silicone RTV Rubber from Circle K Products, one of the finest mold-making rubbers available for fine art. It captures every nuance of your original with extraordinary fidelity: the texture of a thumbprint, the grain of a tool mark, the delicate edge of a wax buildup. For our mother molds, we use HydroCal White Gypsum Cement for its dimensional stability and strength. Together they produce molds built to last — durable enough to yield many high-quality editions without any loss of detail or integrity.

Located just outside Los Angeles in Oxnard, California, we're in the Los Angeles area weekly and offer on-site studio assessments. For delicate sculptures that need special handling, we can manage transport to our facility.

We work across the full range of scale and complexity — from minute, intricate small parts to large-scale monumental works — and serve contemporary artists and sculptors as well as clients with industrial part requirements. Depending on the piece, that might mean a block mold, a glove mold, or a multi-part mold, and we factor in your intended edition size from the start so the mold supports the full run without compromise.

Thirty years in, we've handled the kind of problems that don't have a textbook answer. We've molded sprawling bronze trees where every branch had to be cut away, registered, and reassembled in exact alignment — cross-referencing detailed reference photographs at every step so the finished casting matched the original limb for limb. And we've taken on monuments where the real skill is foresight: reading a piece in advance to anticipate how each seam and cut will affect the final assembly, long before the first pour. That judgment only comes from decades of experience.

Whether you bring us a clay original, wax, plaster, foam, or a found object, we'll evaluate the best approach and walk you through it before we begin.