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Creating Your Fine Bisque Porcelain Horse From
The Lakeshore Collection, Ltd.
Hand-crafting a fine bisque porcelain horse from The Lakeshore Collection, Ltd., requires artistry, skill and care far beyond many other fine collectibles. But it is this workmanship and the fine bisque porcelain itself, with its unique strength & longevity, that makes them truly heirloom-quality and gives them their uncommon realism, elegance & beauty.
The molding process is not like creating a plastic model, where molten plastic is injected into a steel mold and a formed model is made. With plastic or resins, the model can then be cold painted and any little “goofs” or mistakes can be easily touched up. With fine bisque porcelain, you only have one chance to get everything right---and many chances to fail!
No Lakeshore Collection horse ever comes out of the mold in one piece---the unfired bisque porcelain is too brittle & legs, heads, ears & tails would break off! Plastics, resins, & even earthenware all have a little give which allows legs, for instance, to be gently moved back into proper position after unmolding---not so with porcelain! So the process begins by taking a sculpture and cutting it apart---typically around 12 individual sections per horse!
A clay mold (negative) is then made for each individual piece (body, leg, tail, etc.) or section. These molds are then used to create blocks, or master molds, which contain several individual parts or sections of the horse.
Porous clay is poured into the blocks & then are dried & fired to make the production or “waste” molds. The production molds are called waste molds because their porous clay is soft, loses detail quickly, & can only be used a few times, then are discarded. So many, MANY sets of waste molds are made from the hard blocks, which don’t lose detail, so each casting keeps the detail of the original sculpture.
Then the waste molds are filled with bisque porcelain “slip”, a mixture of special “fine serial” clay that captures even the tiniest detail & water, to about the consistency of cream. Then they’re put in room-sized dryers to allow enough water to evaporate out so each piece can be unmolded and handled without breaking, bending, or falling apart. Then the horse is hand-assembled from the dozen or so individual pieces, and the mold lines where the sections meet are all smoothed off by hand before it’s fired the first time!
At this stage the assembled horse is only about as hard as stiff leather. It is during the high-heat firing that fine bisque porcelain gains its unique great strength, melting and bonding together in a process called vitrification turns it into the hardest & strongest of all art ceramics!
But during this “melting” in firing, it actually gets SOFTER, more like stiff Jello, BEFORE it hardens! Have you ever wondered why you see porcelain figurines of other critters, many times sitting or lying down or on a base, but very few horses? Because horses have high disproportionate body weight on long, skinny legs, as they get softer during firing they can’t bear all that weight & can collapse! So a scaffolding of porcelain rods called stilts must be constructed under and around every single horse!
Due to the hand assembly & vitrification, and even with the precaution of the stilts, 15-20% of the fired pieces, called bisques, don’t meet our tough inspection standards and are scrapped & thrown away at this point!
The bisques then begin the process of hand-painting & additional heat firings. Cold (non-fired) paints sit on the surface without permanently bonding & can chip or rub off. Cold paints from the same batch also dry with little variation so painters can touch up any missed spots or “goofs” on a plastic or resin horse without it being noticeably different.
But we use special china paints and glazes applied in layers & heat fired so they actually fire into the surface and this gives us a finish that is so tough and durable you’d actually have to break or chip it, or use sandpaper to scratch it!
These paints & glazes are not at all consistent like house paint or food coloring because they are made of finely ground natural materials like clay, silica, mica, minerals & pigments. These ground particles are mixed with an emulsifier, usually oil-based, so they can be hand-applied like paint.
Because the glazes are made of natural materials and are heat-fired, it’s not nearly as simple as just letting paint dry. It’s not unusual for a color to turn more yellow, brown, red or pinkish when it’s fired! And the same glaze can turn a different shade again just by firing it a second time or at a slightly different temperature. So it’s virtually impossible to touch up mistakes, because you’d end up with two noticeably different shades, and even more are scrapped!
No machine can match skilled artists and produce such beautifully-shaded, quality, realistic work; therefore, each and every Lakeshore piece is entirely hand-painted.
All this care and uncommon attention to detail ensures your fine bisque porcelain Lakeshore Collection horse will provide you with a lifetime of beauty and enjoyment and be handed down treasured for generations to come!
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