Frogman — Tim Cotterill's smallest pieces are the most affordable bronze we sell: 154 pieces live right now, $215 to $12,100, median just $1,180. If cast bronze is new to you, this is usually where I point people to start.

Frogs, mostly — but not only

Of the 154 pieces, 132 are frogs; the rest are geckos, owls, songbirds, a dragonfly, even a caterpillar, cast and patinaed the same way. Edition sizes run from as few as 35 casts — the blue "Bonneville" — up to 5,000 on "Little Wally." Pieces are grouped into named series: the Gems Collection, Gems Collection II, the High Tea line. The patina is worked by hand on every casting, so two pieces from the same edition never come out looking quite identical. A lot of these are genuinely small — several pieces measure under four inches in any direction.

Individual pieces carry their own small stories once you look closely. "Aurora" is the sixth piece in the Gem II series, released in 2014 in an edition of 5,000. "Lucky Bug" pairs a golden frog with a ladybug — the line itself calls it, in Tim's own words, "a token of good fortune, and a special good-luck gift," released in 2010, also in an edition of 5,000. "High Tea – Tea Garden," from 2015, is built to display alongside the smaller Gem-series pieces rather than stand alone. "Bonneville," in its blue colorway, breaks from the frog format entirely — pearlescent midnight blue paint, stainless steel wheels, named for the gearhead gatherings at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. "Chico" is built as a wall-hanging piece rather than a tabletop one. Butterflies turn up as a recurring motif too, worked into the patina the same way the frogs themselves are.

What we've learned selling these

Frogman's newest addition to the line, "Joker and Jester," is a courtly pair with bold patterned patinas, sold either individually or as a matching numbered set — the same option exists on a few other pieces, like "Paperweight – Triangle." It says something about how this line actually gets bought: not always one frog at a time, but in matched pairs and small groupings that build into a bigger collection over the years.

Right now 82 of our 154 listed pieces are down to one or two copies, and 4 — "Chico," "Midas Touch," "Rendezvous," and "Over the Top" — have sold out completely. Colour matters too: "The Diver" is gone in blue but still available in green, so if a particular patina is what you're after, check the variant rather than the piece. That's a lot of near-empty editions for a collection this size — worth checking on a specific piece before you commit to it.

These ship easily and make an easy way to start a bronze collection a piece or two at a time rather than all at once. Call us if you're after a particular series or year and we'll tell you what's actually left of it.

— Steve Schlag, founder, Dolphin Galleries