Coil Pot

Alright, so this picture is a lot nicer because my professor took it to include in his teaching portfolio. This piece I worked on for 10 hours straight, and I do mean straight. I sketched a few different ideas, and this is the one I went with. I originally wasn't going to do the little lip rim thing, but it looked really strange so I added it. My professor wasn't a fan of my glazing, but hey, different strokes for different folks.  Besides, you can hardly even see the glazing in this picture, at least not around the top.

Hard Slab

For the hard slab box we had to have at least 3 non right angles. A little perspective, the last time I tries to bake a hard slab box, it was such a complete and utter failure that it couldn't even be categorized as a box. Fantastic. Thankfully, this one turned out a bit better. It's shape is supposed to approximate a stylized "M" and the lid was supposed to be in 2 halves, but the glaze glued then together at one end so there is kind of a huge gap in my lid :(

Master Copy/Museum Piece

For this project we basically had to recreate a piece that we found in the museum on campus. Mine is pretty close, with one glaring error, the coil at the bottom was supposed to the smaller than the column. I made the bowl out of coils, the column out of soft slab, the coil out of a coil (weird, right?) and the bottom out of a hard slab. Looking back, it may have been better to pinch the bowl, but coils work too. It's probably about 6-ish inches tall. I really like how the glaze turned out on this one though. :)

Soft Slab

Ugh, I definitely do NOT like these, I'll probably keep one, but the rest have been documented and will probably go away. I underestimated the amount of clay I would need, so they are skinny almost to the point of uselessness, those handles are ridiculously huge, the glaze turned out too dark, and the while accents didn't even show up that great...oh well. We had to do a set of 4 identical mugs. Mine are mostly identical, sorta.

Ceramics: Handbuilding

Now to the ceramics portion of our program... We started off the semester with handbuilding. Ok, so the last time I was in a ceramics class was in middle school, and before that, my 2nd grade clay class, I like to think I've improved a bit since then.

Pinch Pots, minimal to no tools used. There are two more, but they didn't get fired hot enough and so the glaze is this strange pea-soup color >.< I may post them later, but I doubt it.




















Pinch Mugs, some tool use, mostly to carve out the handle. There are three, but I'll probably only keep the smallest one, it's my favorite. As far as measurements, I'm not really sure how big they are, but they are pretty small, same with the pinch pots.

Value Color

First off, I love ribbon dancing. If I was graceful enough to pull it off, that would be my chosen career path. Well, maybe just in the top 5. Anyway, I wanted to incorporate that somewhere in the semester, so I chose to do it for my value project with color. I looked at a lot of different pictures, and got a sense for the movement of the ribbon and the dancer. I made quite a few sketches of what kind of composition I wanted, and ended up with this. My instructor didn't like that the background was a solid color, and told me to make it have variants like the figure and the ribbon. I had already tried that and it was too distracting. I got points taken off anyway, but whatever, I still like it like this. :) We had a few color schemes to choose from, and I chose complementary.

Grayscale Value

For my Grayscale Value project I did a self-portrait. I am not bald, my hair is just pulled back... Anyways, I've noticed that a lot of people do this type of project with organic shapes and curved lines, so I wanted to do only straight lines. So I did. I thought it was interesting to see a human face done in straight lines, because that is not what we see in the real world. I used three values.