People ask me all the time what draws me to stainless steel. Honestly, it's the stubbornness. Stainless steel is rigid, industrial, and it absolutely does not want to look like anything organic. It doesn't want to curve. It doesn't want to flow. And convincing it to become a flower petal or a fish fin or the scales of a dragon? That's the part I love. There's something deeply satisfying about taking the most unyielding material I can find and coaxing it into something that feels alive.

I work out of my studio in Durham, North Carolina, and I've been creating welded sculptures from stainless steel for over a decade now. Every piece is an original design. No molds, no CNC machines, no outsourcing. From the very first sketch to the final grind, it's just me, my tools, and a whole lot of patience. I want to walk you through what that process actually looks like, because I think the making is just as interesting as the finished sculpture.

It Starts with Research and Sketching

Before I touch any metal, I spend a lot of time studying whatever creature or plant I'm about to create. I look at reference photos from every angle. I study how the animal is built, how it moves, where light hits it, how the colors shift across its body. I need to understand the subject before I can figure out how to translate it into steel.

From there I start sketching. Sometimes I know exactly what I want and the sketch comes quickly. Other times I'll go through dozens of iterations trying to nail the right pose or composition. For my dragon sculpture, I actually brought in my friend Konstantin, an incredibly talented illustrator, to help me work through the movement and fluidity of the creature before I started cutting.

Cutting and Shaping

Once I have the design locked in, I start cutting flat sheets of stainless steel with a plasma cutter. I cut out all the individual pieces that will eventually become fins, petals, scales, feathers, whatever the sculpture needs. For the dragon, that meant cutting over 1,500 individual scales. For an orchid, it meant figuring out how to cut pieces thin and delicate enough to read as flower petals.

Then comes shaping. This is where the real challenge begins with welded art. Stainless steel is flat. It wants to stay flat. And I need to bend it into compound curves that mimic organic forms. I use a combination of hammering, bending by hand, and working with my grinder to coax each piece into the right shape. Every single piece is shaped individually. There's no shortcut for this part, and honestly I wouldn't want one.

Welding and Grinding

Once the pieces are shaped, I start welding them together. This is where the sculpture really begins to take form. I tack pieces in place, step back, make sure everything looks right, then weld them down permanently. One of the biggest challenges with welded sculpture is hiding the welds. Nobody wants to see a big bead of weld running down the side of a flower petal. So I spend a ton of time grinding the welds smooth and blending them into the surrounding metal so the seams disappear.

My main tools at this stage are my welder, an angle grinder for the bigger areas, and a pencil grinder for the fine detail work. The pencil grinder is probably my most used tool. It lets me get into tight spaces and refine small details that would be impossible with a bigger grinder. I use it for things like individual feather barbs, the texture on bark, the ridges on a shell. The detail work is tedious and time consuming, but it's also where the sculpture starts to come alive.

Coloring with Heat Patinas

This is probably the part people are most surprised by. There is no paint on any of my metal sculptures. None. Zero. Every color you see is created using only heat from torches. It's called a heat patina, and the way it works is that when you heat stainless steel to specific temperatures, the surface oxidizes and produces color. The hottest temperature gives you blue. As you back off the heat you get purple, then gold, then the natural silver of the stainless steel.

The tricky part is that you can only go in one direction. You start with blue (the hottest) and work your way down. So if I want a piece to have blue, purple, gold, and silver, I color the whole thing blue first. Then I grind away the blue everywhere I want a cooler color, re-heat to get purple in those spots, grind away the purple where I want gold, and so on. For something like my lionfish sculpture, this process took days of hand grinding with a pencil grinder, carefully matching color stripes across dozens of separate pieces.

The beauty of heat patinas is that the colors are part of the metal itself. They'll never chip, peel, or fade the way paint would. The color is literally in the surface of the steel.

Why Every Piece Is Unique

Because everything is handmade, no two pieces are ever exactly the same. A hand-ground feather won't look identical to the next one. The heat patina colors shift slightly depending on how long I hold the torch and how far away I am from the metal. The compound curves have subtle variations from being shaped by hand rather than stamped by a machine. I think that's what makes welded sculpture feel different from mass-produced metal art. There's a human quality to it, small imperfections and character that you just can't get from a factory.

Each sculpture is its own set of puzzles and creative problems. For the dragon, the puzzle was figuring out how to make 1,500 scales overlap naturally. For the orchid, it was making rigid steel look delicate enough to pass as a petal. That's what keeps me coming back to the studio every morning. I never know exactly what challenge is going to show up next, and I find that genuinely exciting.

If you've made it this far, thank you for taking the time to learn about my process! I hope it gives you a new appreciation for what goes into each piece. Feel free to browse the gallery and if anything speaks to you, or you'd like to talk about a custom commission, please don't hesitate to reach out. These are my favorite conversations to have.