Life Size Baseball Player – 1930’s Walter Johnson

The city of Rockville, Maryland contacted me earlier this year about making a life size sculpture of Walter Johnson, a manager and pitcher for the Washington Senators during the 1930s. It was to go on the grounds of a ballfield in Rockville.

We settled on the sculpture being 6 feet tall with a 1 foot base. I got some reference photos and started carving!

I refined the face first – in these next pictures you can see the face emerge.

We moved the rough sculpture from my carving site to my town studio to finish the finer details, sand, kiln dry, and oil.

Next, I kiln dried it for about a week. It lost 5 gallons of water – which is about 40 pounds! The beauty of kiln drying is that it precracks the carving. I repair the cracks and the customer gets a stable carving whose pressure has already been relieved.

He had some pretty nasty cracks in his face, so I did some restorative surgery…

Once the cracks were repaired I could move on to staining.

Finished!!

Thanks for looking! Feel free to contact us with your idea for a custom memorial or figure!