It was coming down an inch an hour Friday afternoon. The heavy snow quickly re-blanketed the streets after each pass of the plow, and it turned Elmhurst College art students and their teacher into human snowmen as they gathered outside Old Main.

Conditions couldn't have been much worse, but that didn't stop this sculpture class or their teacher—who has the coolest name ever—from completing the task at hand: pouring molten bronze into more than a dozen hand-made, sand-casted molds.

"The cold is horrible for this," teacher Dustan Creech said. "It's the exact opposite of what you want. That's part of the challenge."

It happens every year at this time, because this bronze sculpture class is taught in the J-Term.

"In January, we can have one-of-a-kind classes. It's kind of a unique experience," Creech said.

Students began to bring their molds outside a couple at a time. Over in one corner near the parking lot, a hand-made propane furnace blasted away, bringing its contents to a blistering 2,200 degrees. The heat coming off of that inferno wasn't enough to keep the group warm, but the ceramic crucible inside glowed white-hot.

It took three people to carefully remove the crucible, carry it over to the mold and pour the bronze—its color an unearthly orange—into the molds.

Creech, who has been teaching at Elmhurst for three years, invited his friend from New York, Kevin Dartt, to come and assist.

"I came down just for the pour," Dartt said. "I really wanted to see his new furnace in action."

Dartt and Creech met at an iron pour in Indiana, and they worked together for a time at Creech's former studio in Chicago. This kind of work creates comrades.

Creech said bronze work like this is very labor intensive. It's sad that so many people don't appreciate the process, he said.

"It's awesome that we get to do this," he said. "It's a dying art. Nobody wants to work hard these days. Everyone just wants to Google something and get their answer right away. I mean, god, I love my computer, but I think it has created a generation of students that want immediate answers."

Art, by its nature, is the opposite, he said.

"Art is all about exploring things and seeing how many different solutions there are to a problem or an issue," Creech said. "That's the whole idea. That's hard to grasp when I can just click a few (links) and get my answer right away."

When the first pour had to be aborted and the tools placed back on the furnace to be heated, one student even said, as if on cue, "I would have been done with this by now."

But it takes a lot of explanation before moving molten metal, and the process has to be safe. The first pour was finally completed around 2 p.m.; then it was back to the furnace with new bronze to melt.

J.P. Provenza's mom, Catherine, drove all the way down from Mount Prospect to see the pour. She is from a generation that appreciates the process.

"I figured, I've never seen it before, I'll probably never get to see this again," she said. It was J.P.'s first year in sculpture class.

"I'm using rebar, with bases of aluminum and bronze, and I'm going to add concrete and wood, maybe," he said, describing his abstract piece.

A lot of the students created molds for abstract sculptures. Some made a practical piece.

Speaking of practical, Creech has an idea on how to use this craft to give back to the community. He recently found out that someone stole the bronze letters off of the Frank Lloyd Wright church in Oak Park known as Unity Temple, he said.

"That's something I've been interested in. I asked them about us helping to replace them. I hope this is something we're able to do."