Return to Arundel

Finally, on 5th October 2008 we made the trip to return St. Anthony to his home in Arundel Cathedral. Many thanks to Fr. Tim for his patience during this challenging and rewarding project!


The Dearsley family pose with St. Anthony and Fr. Tim

The finished statue

After a few final touches and a spray coat of matt varnish, the statue is finished.

Painting - Stone texture & weathering

To create a stone texture I applied four different stone colours using a firm long bristled brush and a toothbrush, working dark to light.

Once this 'spattered' effect had been applied all over the statue I then began weathering the deep creases and details using a combination of airbrush and dark brush washes blended with a wet sponge.

This gave the statue a slightly weathered and lived-in look, which would blend in with the other statues at Arundel Cathedral.

Painting - materials & base coat

After some research I settled on using Liquitex Soft Body artists acrylic paints. These have an excellent lightfastness grade, and the range includes things like gesso primer, airbrush meduim and varnishes.


To spray large areas I use a Yama spray gun, and for finer details an Olympos SP-B airbrush.



I initially sprayed the whole statue with a white gesso to prepare the surface for painting, and then applied a custom-mixed base stone colour.

Painting - colour matching

Fr. Tim had shown me the other statues on display at Arundel Cathedral, and mentioned that he'd like St. Anthony to blend in with them and the architecture if possible. As this statue is white plaster it was obvious that a stone paint effect would be needed for the statue to fit in.

My first task was to decide on the colour pallette. I created a variety of subtle colour variations of some reference photos that I'd previously taken inside the Cathedral, and these were printed out and cut into strip 'swatches'. We then took these to Arundel so we could choose which swatch most closely matched the stonework in it's natural lighting environment.

The chosen swatch then became my hardcopy reference that I knew would match the Cathedral stonework.

Final cleaning & preparation for painting

At this stage all the seams and new sculpting have been completed, and I just need to remove some remaining patches of grime before painting.

This image clearly shows the contrast between the grime and the bare plaster.






The final, reconstructed statue - next, onto the painting...

Sanding & shaping the hip, chest and hand seams

The next stage is to sand all seams flat and shape any areas that were missing so that they match the original.

In this image the joins of the hip section of the Jesus figure are almost fully blended into the original pieces.


Here, the edge of the Bible has two filled gaps which I'm starting to detail.


This photo shows how the small hole that I bridged with a wooden batten has now been filled.


The filler in the thumb and index finger are beginning to take shape.

Jesus figure - arm & 2nd pass hand shaping

I now take another look at the fingers on the baby Jesus figure, and begin carving them to show rough indications of the shape and joints. This is mainly done by a combination of paring away with a 10A scalpel and sanding with aluminium oxide sanding sheet.





Once I'm happy with the second pass shaping of the fingers, I roughly fill the remaining seams on the arms.

First pass hip, chest & hand filling

Now that the cracks in the hand have been strengthened, and all the joins have been prepared, I can begin first pass filling.

Preparing seams on the hip & hand

Next I chanelled out the seams where the hip section was glued into position, ready for filling.


The fractures on the hand aslo had to be chanelled out and glued prior to filling.


As there were closed and open fractures that were being supported by the metal armature [visible through the damage to the thumb] I used a medium viscosity super glue which I allowed to run into the cracks. This would seep into the cracks and around the metal armature, and solidify the the porous plaster.

More cleaning

With the majority of the gluing completed I decided to do a bit more general cleaning of the statue.

Main figure hand damage

Apart from the obvious damage to the thumb on the right hand of St. Anthony, there were also two closed fractures - one near the base of the thumb, and one on the index finger. These would have to be chanelled back and glued before filling.

Gluing hip & chest structure

The hip structure which I had assembled previously could now be glued to the main statue. A dry test-fitting shows that the hip section is aligning nicely.




Using epoxy resin, the hip section is glued into position. A missing fragment had left a hole between St.Anthony's chest and the thigh of the
Jesus figure, so I glued a thin wooden batten across the back of the hole to act as a support for filling later on.


After the glue was set, I was able to dry-fit the Jesus torso to the main figure and get a glimpse of the full statue for the first time.