The head of the 15-meter T-rex that artist Kevin Stone is sculpting for a client in Penticton.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED

It’s going to be rewarding for the artist who’s spending two years sculpting a metal T-rex for a beach house in Penticton to finally have his masterpiece on public display.

Sculptor Kevin Stone from Chilliwack takes a considerable amount of time to complete each project. He rarely ever sees his works of art again once they’ve been shipped off, as most of his sales are international and many of his commissions are for private collections.

“I’m already 52, these take a couple years per project – I don’t have a whole lot of projects left to do,” Stone said.

But the dinosaur in Penticton will live just a few hours away from him, and it will be viewable for the public to enjoy.

His 15-metre T-rex will be larger-than-life as it models a creature that only grew to about six metres in reality. He figures the entire project will require somewhere between 500 and 600 hours worth of labour and a total of 20 months to complete. Having started in June, he is prepared for another 15 months of work on it.

“My body is wearing out and these projects are getting really hard to achieve just by myself,” he said, adding that his wife Michelle helps out as best she can.

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If the stainless steel sculpture is well taken care of, he said it should be able to last for hundreds of years.

“Long after I’m gone,” he said. 

Even with decades of experience, the T-rex is presenting Stone with challenges that he’s never faced before. The creature was designed in his imagination based off other artist renderings of the prehistoric creature. In order to assemble the one-of-a-kind sculpture, he’s designed numerous unique pieces for the structure and figured out a frame to hold it all together.

Bit by bit and tooth by tooth, Stone continues chipping away at the head of the T-rex, but he is currently focused on the frame of the project.

One of the limits imposed upon the creation of the dinosaur is the amount of space that can be transported on a public highway, which limits each section to a maximum width and height of 12 feet. But its major pieces will be assembled on site to allow the sculpture to reach its full scale.

It will be installed in a way that leaves onlookers guessing as to how it was constructed, Stone said.

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For a strong base, the metal comprising each of the dinosaur's feet is 1.5 inches thick. Each leg weighs about 2,000 lbs, and he estimates the total weight of the sculpture will be around 15,000 lbs.

Stone is more than a year away from completing the T-rex, but in his future endeavours, he eventually hopes to be involved in a sculpture that sets a world record.

“I want to leave my mark in the world.”

Many of Kevin Stone creations are welded together.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED

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