Nanoose Bay blacksmith Dave Kasprick became interested in octopuses over the years he encountered them as a commercial fisherman, and lately he's started creating art in their likeness.
His latest commission is a lifelike sculpture of an octopus and he estimated it is approximately 36 inches wide.
“If you were to stretch the tentacles out it would probably be over seven feet,” said Kasprick, who has been blacksmithing for about 17 years. “It’s a pretty cool project.”
He starts off by making all the suckers and over the course of making six or seven octopus sculptures (or various sizes), he's made quite a few.
“I knew there was gonna be a lot of them and I kind of dread it,” Kasprick added. “I’ve probably made a thousand of 'em.”
Kasprick cuts plenty of "round stock", which he heats up and then uses his power hammer to squish them "like plasticine" into the desired shape.
Next it's onto the tentacles. He said he tries to keep the form light so he takes a two and a quarter-inch pipe and tapers it to a fine point at the end, before bending it so it resembles one of the cephalopod's eight appendages. The comes the lengthy process of attaching all those suckers.
Getting the octopus' head right is difficult. He uses a balloon to figure out how the mantle should look and how large it should be.
“That’s the trickiest part, is the eyeballs, the placement and having the mantle roll over back onto its body, onto the back of the legs, so it doesn’t look like a cartoon character," Kasprick added. “Often a lot of octopus sculptures you see, they’re really cool but they look a bit cartoon-ish.”
He became interested in blacksmithing when he watched a farrier heating up metal for a horseshoe on his acreage and thought "I could do that". Kasprick was already interested in moulding clay from his time in art school.
“When metal’s hot, it moves the same as plasticine or clay does — and that’s how it all kind of morphed into what I do now.”
Kasprick owns and runs the Red Cod Forge. For more information on his work, visit his Facebook page facebook.com/RedCodForge.
