Step 1: The Clay Mould. The first step for an artist is to create their plaster, wax, clay mold, or preliminary sculpture. The reason for the plaster or clay mold is to establish the piece's final look at a smaller, more malleable scale with material that is easier to refine and correct before tackling the marble.

 — Chisels are a manual tool that are used to chip away at stone to remove small pieces at a time, so that the artist can produce the form that they want one bit at a time. There are also other supporting tools used alongside the chisel, such as hammers or mallets, which we will talk about next.

 — Some marble statues, even when stripped of their color by the sands of time since the heyday of Greece and Rome, look practically alive. But they began their 'lives,' their appearance often makes us forget, as rough-hewn blocks of stone. Open Culture, openculture.com

Following CNC programming, the advantages are more noticeable in the case of parts with large curved and complex surfaces, such as for marble, wood and plastic sculptures. Furthermore, with the most recent numerical controls, we begin to implement advanced surface machining functions, allowing you to work 3D NURBS surfaces natively, without …

 — Once the NC program is complete, you can create an infinite number of sculptures given you have the blank materials. This opens up some unique opportunities for product manufacturing. CNC machining has made simple everyday objects into works of art.

See how artist Eja Siepman van den Berg CNC machined a refined human torso sculpture in marble, using the DeskProto 3D CAM software.

RoboCut Stone is a complete milling robotic cell, with sculpting robot up to 6 interpolated axes. An extremely flexible solution for: sculpture, design, architecture and furniture. With RoboCut Stone you can perform all the milling phases, from roughing the rough block, to finishing the details.

 — A CNC stone router machine is a fully automatic computer-controlled machine tool capable of carving and cutting marble, granite, ceramics, ink-stone, jade, headstone, tombstone, artificial stone, glass, quartz, blue stone, natural stone to make cabinets, arts, crafts, inscription, Buddhas statues & sculptures.

Make masonry easy with stone machinery. Equip your team with a marble statue cutting machine and discover specialist cutting or grinding tools at a wholesale marketplace.

 — Step 1: the mould. The first thing an artist should do is make a mould from clay or plaster, which they will use to model the concept or figure they've chosen. This material is ideal because it allows you to add all the details you need for your final sculpture.