Wire Sculpture: Materials & Tools
Find out what you need to start drawing in air
Twisting yourself up about sculpting with wire? Bend this hardware store staple to your fancy with this quick guide to materials and tools!
Wire sculpting is an excellent hobby. The materials are readily available from local hardware shops, inexpensive, easy to work, and can be manipulated outside a studio space. The process creates little mess and involves simple techniques. The resulting sculpture is also fairly light, small and may be displayed in several different ways: by being framed, mounted or hung.
For many artists, wire sculpting provides an easy way to shift from drawing to sculpture. Like certain types of drawing, working with wire often involves working with a continuous line. New sculptors may wish to start with flat designs and move on to create three-dimensional compositions. In the process, they develop skills to solve problems in space, to explore relationships between solid and empty space, and to emphasize elements to communicate ideas.
Basic tools and equipment include:
- Wire
- Galvanized wire of 16g and 18g are the best to use. Extremely fine 20g is suitable for small projects, to make decorative highlights or tie thicker wire together.
- Soft brass and copper wire is more expensive and more difficult to obtain, but is easily worked. This is popularly used for jewellery but can also be used together with silver-coloured wire for contrast.
- Silver wire is costly and is therefore generally used to make jewellery.
- Picture wire of steel, brass or copper is made of fine twisted strands of wire and can be used to make attractive jewellery or to add texture to sculpture.
- Scrap wire, especially the ones coated in colourful plastic may be used to make whimsical projects or to add interest to a sculpture.
- Pliers and wire cutters
- Have at least two pairs of pliers available to shape harder or thicker wires. Specially shaped pliers include round-nosed pliers (popular in jewellery making) and flat-ended pliers. Wire cutters will be able to take care of most needs, and a hacksaw may be handy for very thick wire.
- Plasticine and wooden board
- A few lumps of plasticine on a board or bench is useful to hold wires upright temporarily when designing or experimenting, and also to keep the entire sculpture in place when making joins.
- Tape
- Plastic electrical tape will be sticky and strong enough to hold wires temporarily together in space.
- Glue, solder, soldering iron, clips and weights
- Wooden clothespins and metal electrical clips can be used to hold wires together when creating permanent joins with epoxy, super glue or solder. Some rocks or metal weights are useful to create and maintain good contact points when soldering. A soldering stand can be jerry-rigged in a well-ventilated space using an old wire rack, some bricks and an old metal tray.
- Dowels and jigs
- Wind wire around straight or tapered dowels to create spirals. A home-made jig consisting of pegs in a board may also be used to create sections of uniformly bent wire in U-shapes, zig-zags, waves, S-bends or radiating patterns.
Read Cirque Calder to find out how the inventor of the mobile built an entire miniature circus out of wire.
Curious for more? Please visit the article archives and e-mail me with your questions.
