Someone from Pepsi reached out to me and requested a bespoke lobster sculpture to be made as a gift to commemorate Pepsi's ongoing relationship with Red Lobster. They asked if I could create a large Pepsi logo and weld a red lobster to it and I said as long as they were ok with a golden reddish purple color instead of a bright red then I certainly could!

And they were up for it! The biggest challenge of this piece was getting consistent colors on the Pepsi logo. Since I do all of my coloring using only heat it can be very hard to get a consistent color over a large surface area without detail grinding or breaks in the metal to distract the eye. Because if I hold the torch slightly longer on any part of the piece it will alter the color. This was especially true for the "red" portion of the logo as it is a narrower temperature window and the colors slightly cooler and slightly hotter are noticeably different. The other challenge was getting the logo domed in a smooth clean manner. I did this by hand using an arbor press, but getting a perfect dome is near impossible by hand so I had to weld a circle out of 5/16" rod and then force the dome to meet it and weld it bit by bit until it snapped into shape.

The metal lobster was much more up my alley as I have made many of them before and the red color was easier since the pieces are smaller, meaning if they turned out really bad I could always regrind them and start over. But usually it worked because there was enough other detail that your eye doesn't focus in on the subtle differences as much.

You might also enjoy my other lobster sculptures: Blue Lobster, Red Lobster, Striped Lobster.

This lobster sculpture is wall hanging, made entirely of stainless steel, colored using only heat patinas, and is safe to be kept outdoors!