This is how I made a sculpture of an Egyptian cat or Bast the cat goddess for my daughter who’s long had a fascination for things Egyptian. I believe the goddess is also known as Bastet or Bastis.

The sculpture is about 3 feet tall or just under a metre. It’s made primarily from polyurethane foam. The foam is very easy to work and very light in weight, though not one of the most pleasant materials to work with. It’s essential to wear a dust mask or some other form of respiratory protection.

The sculpture is about 3 feet tall or just under a metre. It’s made primarily from polyurethane foam. The foam is very easy to work and very light in weight, though not one of the most pleasant materials to work with. It’s essential to wear a dust mask or some other form of respiratory protection.

So how do you start making a 3 foot tall cat? I’m no sculptor so I had to figure out a simple way to do it. Also I didn’t have a block of polyurethane foam but sheets about an inch thick. First things first. I got a picture of the goddess Bast. Not the best picture but good enough to get the basic shapes from. Next thing was to scale up the picture of the cat to the size I needed. The good old fashioned method of drawing a grid over the picture of the cat then to draw a larger grid on some plain paper.

How does that work then? Let’s say you want your sculpture to be 4 times bigger than your picture. You would draw a grid of ¼ inch squares over your original picture then you would draw a grid of 1 inch squares, then you draw the outline of your picture on the plain paper using the squares for guidance.

When I’d got two new pictures, one side view of the cat and one front view both the size I needed. I traced the side view drawings and then transferred them onto the sheets of foam so I now had ten identical pieces of foam. I cut the outline of the cat using a craft knife next I glued the ten flat cats together using a hot glue gun. That was not the best idea as the glue when it’s dry is much harder than the foam which caused some slight problems. If I did anything like this again I’d try and find a more suitable glue.

So now I had a block which was cat shaped when seen from the side but not from the front. With one eye on the original picture for guidance I used some coarse abrasive paper and carefully sanded the polyurethane foam to shape. It’s very easy to sand so if you work slowly following the shape of your picture it’s not too difficult to produce a sculpture. If you should make a mistake and get a bit wrong you can always glue another piece of foam on and correct it.

As I said the polyurethane foam is very light weight so I glued a piece of medium density fibreboard to the bottom to give a little more weight and stability. When I was satisfied that I got the shape of the cat right from all angles I needed to do something to give it a more durable finish. Apart from not being smooth enough to paint the foam was much too soft to survive any knocks so I paid a visit to a local glass fibre workshop where I bought a couple of metres of glass fibre surface tissue, which is exactly what it sounds like, and a small quantity of polyester resin.

Next job was to give the cat sculpture a couple of coats of tissue and resin, this was a pretty easy job for me as I once owned my own glass fibre moulding business, but even if you’ve never done it before it wouldn’t be too difficult if you take care and follow the safety precautions.

When the resin was cured I gave it a light sanding, followed by about five coats of resin, each one applied once the previous coat was well cured. Now the cat had a good hard coating which could be sanded really smooth. Any blemishes in the finish or mistakes in the sculpting were rectified with polyester filler, just like you’d repair dents in your car with.

Now with a hard and smooth finish it was time to start painting. I first gave the cat a couple of coats of acrylic spray primer again the sort you can buy from your local car spares shop. This was lightly sanded between coats and after the final coat. Next was the final coat which was an acrylic spray paint with a satin finish rather than a high gloss.

Almost done, just a case of gluing on some cheap plastic beads, and hand painting the details with gold paint. I should point out that the whole sculpture took weeks from start to finish working mainly on Saturday afternoons. A very satisfying project.