Frilled Dragon Sculpture, hydrostone with bronze coating and patina

These majestic animal sculptures are the work of Jason Shanaman, our featured artist for today. Jason’s love of animals really shines through in his works, where he replicates the forms of reptiles like bearded dragons, and great apes, with incredible detail and structure. These incredibly realistic sculptures seem to function as small tributes to the beauty of the artist’s subjects.

A gallery of reptile sculptures on Jason's portfolio website

 
Bearded Dragon Trinket Box, pewter finish

While Jason creates works purely for the sculptural art form, he also makes a lot of functional pieces, like jewelry boxes, magnets, and key-chains in the shapes of his favourite animal subjects. I adore Jason’s tiny lizard and turtle pendants! Any of these would make for a unique and wonderful piece of jewelry.

Jason’s process for creating his sculptures involves casting replicas of an original that he also produces. This leaves room for him to make interesting variations of a single animal form, producing similar sculptures in a variety of materials, and hand-painting them to look more realistic or stylized.

Center for Great Apes Pendant Set, cold cast pewter with bronze finish