| Plaster Sculpting for Original Princess Leia Coin | |
| The great majority of Kenner's Power of the Force coins were sculpted in plaster using a technique common in the coin industry. As you might expect from a company with little experience producing coins, most of this work was contracted out to non-Kenner artisans.
Here you see the sculpt for the original Princess Leia coin. As you can probably tell, the detail is done in relief on a rather large plaster disk. It's rendered at 6:1 scale, meaning the sculpt is around six times larger than intended production scale. That crack you see left of center goes right through the plaster. Somewhere along the line it was fixed using what looks like a combination of glue (to bind the plaster parts together) and wax (to fill in the gaps). Fortunately, the crack does not interfere with any significant details. After the folks at Kenner were finished using the coin sculpts to make hardcopies and softcopies (see here for a detailed article about this process), they were instructed to destroy the sculpts and toss them in a dumpster. I once spoke to someone who remembered whacking them hard against the side of a dumpster and then disposing of the resultant shards of plaster. That may be what happened to this piece. If so, someone picked up the pieces and put them carefully back together. You may be wondering why this piece, which purports to represent the three-dimensional master for the coin, does not include text. This is because coin text was rendered using a completely different process, being added directly onto the steel tools after the image details were already present. For more details on how this was done, see here. |
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| Description by: | Ron Salvatore |
| Photo: | Ron Salvatore |
| From the collection of: | Ron Salvatore |
| Country: | United States |
| Film: | Power of the Force |
| Licensee: | Kenner |
| Year: | 1985 |
| Category: | Prototypes / Coin |