spirals

Rob's Fountain Project

willfountain stone

Our friend Rob, built a custom fountain in the backyard of his Austin home. It is beautifully crafted with concrete, limestone and tile. With an engineering background and a love of science and math, Rob's design uses quite a bit of geometry and plays on the idea of the Golden Rectangle with regard to proportion and layout. He asked me to help him finish it off with a custom etched capstone and gave me a slab of limestone to work with. Below is a picture of the fountain and then the process for creating the headstone.

 

Read about the fountain construction on Rob's blog

rob's fountain

The Process

maskmask

The design I came up with is a series of spirals reminiscent of snails or sea shells. In keeping with Rob's aesthetic, the layout is based loosely on the golden mean for rhythm and scale.

The idea is to create something that looks like a natural limestone fossil.

The design is plotted onto a thick sheet of masking material and applied directly to the stone.

 

 

 

willstone in cabinet

 

 

After the mask is applied, the stone is put into the sandblast cabinet for carving.

Limestone is relatively soft so the sandblasting was done at about 80 psi. using a very fine sand abrasive.

 

 

 

 

maskremove mask

 

 

 

After the carving is done the stone is removed from the cabinet and the mask is removed. The stone is then washed to remove any adhesive residue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The finished piece

fountain stone

still to come...
a final photo of the entire installation