Graeme Anthony

Graeme started his sculpting career creating chess sets carved from white porcelain clay which were then fired in his homemade kiln. He then progressed to press moulding clay pieces and then to slip casting them. Frustrated by the limits to detail reproduction imposed by clay he moved on to,and was a pioneer in, the early development of polyester resin casting.

He designed and sculpted a range of 5 medieval theme chess sets and was the first developer of what is now termed “cold cast”metal. Graeme used iron powder and copper powder to weight his chess pieces and then developed a method to polish the pieces to expose the powder in the resin to give the pieces a metal look finish.

During the early 70’s he experimented with all aspects of polyester resins, epoxy resins, polyurethane, acrylics, plaster, cement, fibre glass silicon rubber and latex rubber. He designed and made a range of metal powder filled resin chess sets and a lot of ornamental Nick knacks.

In 1978 he started experimenting with metal castings and released his first all metal chess set in 1979. These early sets were all themed sets and included 5 medieval sets,an Asterix set, a Wizard of Id set and an Alice in Wonderland set. The first Alice set was exhibited at the Alice art exhibition in Melbourne and was unfortunately stolen.

In 1981 he designed and carved his first War of the|Rings Chess set as well as a huge range of dragons, elves, trolls imps etc. In 1982 he produced his first LotR pewter goblet master but it took over 5 years to perfect its casting reproduction.

This first goblet was Smaug and it proved hugely successful and thus led to the large range of Rings inspired goblets that were developed over the next 15 years. From 1988 to 1996 he developed a large successful range of pewter goblets, pewter and glass vessels, picture frames, chess sets, fantasy figurines, dragons and comic characters.

Demand became greater than production capacity so Sculptors Workshop formed a joint venture company with Royal Selangor International in 1996. This new company, Sculptors Dream, took over the manufacture of his creative output and it’s distribution into their worldwide network. Graeme took back the Australian component of this company in 2010 and is still sculpting and creating and selling his art works from his studio in Fish Creek, Victoria Australia.

Simon Brooks