From clay to resin: how a replica is made
Six stages, none of them mechanised: how a replica goes from a study of the animal to a hand-painted resin cast, and how to look after one.
The collection is not planned as a catalogue. It grows in series, each following a region or an ecosystem for as long as it holds the sculptor’s interest. One of the most distinctive is a small group of animals from the Tibetan plateau.
The Tibetan plateau is the largest and highest plateau on Earth, with an average elevation above 4,000 metres. It is sometimes called the Third Pole, because outside the polar regions nowhere holds more ice. The air is thin, the winters are long and the growing season is brief. The animals that live there are shaped by those limits: bodies adapted to thin air, dense coats, and colours that disappear against bare rock and dry grass.
The kiang, Equus kiang, is the largest of the wild asses. It lives in herds on the open plateau, and in summer its coat is a rich chestnut that breaks sharply against a white belly, legs and muzzle, with a dark stripe along the back. In winter the coat turns darker and much thicker.
The collection has a male and a female, sold separately but proportioned to stand together: the stallion alert with its head raised, the mare grazing. They are the natural starting point for a plateau group.
The bharal, Pseudois nayaur, is known as the blue sheep, though it is neither a true sheep nor a goat; genetically it sits closer to the goats. It lives on steep, open slopes close to cliffs, where its slate-grey coat makes it hard to see against the rock, and a herd will often freeze rather than run. It is the main prey of the snow leopard across much of its range.
The 1:20 male shows the smooth horns that sweep outward and back, and the black stripe along the flank that separates the grey of the back from the pale underparts.
Przewalski’s gazelle, Procapra przewalskii, has the smallest range of the three and the most precarious future. It is found only in China, around Qinghai Lake on the northeastern edge of the plateau. By the 1990s it had fallen to a few hundred animals. Protection has since brought numbers back into the low thousands, but it is still classed as endangered.
Like the wild horse, it is named after the 19th-century Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky. At 1:20 it is one of the smallest pieces in the collection, just 27 millimetres long, and one of the most delicate to paint.
The three animals share a landscape and a scale, and they can be displayed together as a single plateau group, from the bulk of the kiang to the slight figure of the gazelle.
Six stages, none of them mechanised: how a replica goes from a study of the animal to a hand-painted resin cast, and how to look after one.
Nine million years ago, natural traps on a hill south of Madrid caught saber-toothed cats by the dozen. The Batallones sites and the pieces they inspired.