STONE Until the end of the Angkor period

STONE Until the end of the Angkor period. the material of choice for sculpture was sandstone, though brick, stucco and terracotta were still used in small quantities Shale was used for the pedenstals and as a support for inscriptions The statues are carved straight into the stone, almost always in a single block of stone The sculptors did not work from a model and so expressed themselves with great spontaneity and sensitivity, but they sometimes made mistakes which meant the whole piece had to be abandoned The statues became smaller and smaller at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth centuries, not because sculptors tried to be more efficient but probably because it was difficult to find large blocks of homogenous stone At the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries, since large-scale sculptures were made with poor quality sandstone, sculptors started using special equipment In the period following Angkor, stone sculptures were sometimes decorated with layers of black, red and gold coating, which resembles that found in wooden sculptures