The first project I did this year was the tripod vessel. It was constructed using a slab and the bottom was pinched into the legs. I decorated the outside with white and light pink glaze. The only thing I would do differently with this piece is use food safe glaze so that it could be used as a cup. The next piece I did was my “Candy Box”  for the Artist Tell Stories project. I got the idea for the piece from a trip that I took to Los Angeles. The piece was very time consuming because I had to make and place all 120 of the dots on the box, but it was a good way of learning repetition and patience. For the playlist project I chose nature and made a lotus flower. I have never had project change so much before it was finished. The very first idea that I had was to make a lily pad with the flower on it, which then turned into just the lotus flower. After getting wrapped up in another project I was not able to finish the inside of the flower. Then I realized that it would make a good candle holder, so I fired it and then glazed it in a deep purple color. If I had to redo one of my projects, it would be the lotus flower and I would complete my original vision of the flower on the lily pad. The portrait bust was by far the most challenging project I have done in this class, it took me just about four months to complete. I rolled each and every coil of hair and each pearl to put on this piece. I was so happy when it came out of the kiln as a whole, there was only about two pearls gone and a couple hair pieces that that had broken. I used white underglaze on the whole bust because I wanted it to have a matte finish. One more thing that I decided to do was to add clear glaze on all of the pearls, which is why they are pink in the most current photo. I think that it will make them stand out a little more if they are not matte like the rest of the piece. I am very proud of this project and I’m happy with how it has turned out. For my last project I did a teacup and saucer, it was pretty simple. I am still glazing it, there will be more pink hearts added around the saucer and the whole thing will have a glossy finish.

This year I have come a long way in developing my art making skills and learning how to have patience when it comes to art. While working on projects I started to learn my own way of doing things and also learning that I like a certain style of work. I think that I have shown growth this year. In my first couple of projects I did not take many risks and kind of kept it simple. As I moved on to the portrait bust project I began focusing more on details and taking risks. If I were to try to make the same project while I was in Ceramics 1, I do not think that it would be successful because I did not have the same amount of experience that I have now. Even though there are a few things that I would change about some of my projects, I am happy with how everything turned out.

 

 

After finishing my portrait bust, I decided to make a more simple project. I ended up making a teacup and saucer. First I made the cup by doing a small pinch pot and flattening out the bottom. When I first made the handle it was too small and the shape of it was crooked. To fix the problem, I made a bigger handle and held it in place with crumpled up newspaper so it wouldn’t droop. For the saucer I rolled a slab and first cut a small circle to create the base, and then a bigger circle for the main piece. Once it was fired, I did realize that I did not make the spot where the teacup sits flat enough because it is a little wobbly. Now I am glazing it, the saucer has black glaze and the teacup has a light pink underglaze. I plan on putting more pink hearts around the edge of the saucer.

 

This year I feel like I have improved the most in the Create Original Art and Art Making Skills category. As far as creating my own art, I have moved away from looking for ideas of what to make in other people’s artwork and instead try to generate some ideas of my own. This has more successful for me because it produces more unique work that I do not feel as if I took the idea from someone else. The best example of this would be my candy box project. For Art Making Skills I have, I have learned new techniques and also developed new ways of doing things that I did not know how to do before. While working on the candy box project I learned that using a wire cutter to cut the small sphere shapes in half worked the best because it was the thinnest thing to use and it disrupted the shape the least. I found an easier way to get small coils while working on my portrait bust, by cutting them out of a thin slab first.

Areas that I need to improve in would be Artist Plan and Global Awareness. I usually just jump right into a project when I get the idea, rather than drawing a sketch and making a maquette. Sometimes this causes me to change my mind about something in the middle of the project. I think that Global Awareness is an important category to focus on so that artwork comments on the world that we live in. In the future I would like to improve in the category and make an artwork that says something about our society.

Bowl

I chose the first piece because I like that it has decoration on it that tells a story. I like the second one because of it use of the two different shades of blue ans the floral design. The last one is interesting because at first glance, it just looks like swirls but then you can see the image of a bird.

During this activity I learned how to caption pictures in the blog.

     

For the past week I have been working on the hair part of my portrait bust. While working on it, I have learned new techniques for coil rolling that makes it a lot easier to roll thin coils. What I figured out to do is first make a very thin slab and then cut long pieces of clay out. Now, you have a long square coil and you can pinch the edges of it then roll it out like a regular coil. This makes it easier to roll thin coils because you can start from a smaller piece of clay rather than clay straight from the pug mill. It also is less likely for the coil to dry out because you don’t have to roll it as long. In order to create volume on the ends of each braid in her hair, I made small pockets of clay to place the ringlets of hair on top of. Another technique that I learned is to paint water on the surface of an area of the clay with a paintbrush. This makes the surface almost like slip so you can easily carve into it. I used this to do the stripes on her blouse.

 

         

After building the initial form of my of my portrait bust, I came across a couple of problems. The first problem was that I forgot to add the large puffy sleeves to the sides of the bust. To fix that, I rolled a slab and cut out two oval shapes and I rounded them into three dimensional pieces. Then I cut two small holes in the sides of the bust underneath where the sleeves would go to allow for air to pass through. Another thing that I fixed was the part of the chest that is above the braids and below the neck. As you can see in the first picture of the piece, that area is kind of protruding outward. So what did was cut two small darts out of that area and then pushed the clay together and attached it. This resulted in making the chest more concave, you can tell the difference in the second picture of the bust. A risk that I have taken on the project so far, have been the braid necklace. Instead of just rolling long coil and shaping it to look like a braid, I actually rolled three small coils and braided them together as if they were hair. It was really challenging to do and I think that it could have easily failed because the coils kept cracking while I was trying to braid them.

     

My candy dots project finally came out of the kiln. The colors after they had clear glaze fired over them turned out to be a lot darker. Some of the dots are a little rough still because I guess they did not get completely coated in the clear glaze. Looking back at the project I am overall very pleased with it. I would not do anything different if I could as far as the building process of the project. The only thing that i might have done differently is test the glaze colors with the clear glaze on them because that is when they got lot darker.

As for my next project, I decided to go with the nature project and make a lily pad with a flower on it. I do not intend for it to have any purposes of utility, hopefully it will just look pretty. I researched different images, so I could get a visual of where I will be going with the project. While I was researching I found out that the flowers that usually sit on lily pads are water lilies.

 

                                                

Since my project has been  fired and ready to be glazed now I have to decide what colors I am going to use. On the actual dot candy, the colors are very bright. There is pink, orange, yellow, green, and blue. To plan out the colors, I am testing the glaze on a leftover tripod vessel.  I think that the yellow and the blue will turn out how I want them to but I am worried about the pink and green. I am trying to get just the right shade of pink but it is really hard when the pink I am trying to get is a really bright shade. I will be taking a risks in the fact that I will probably end up using more of the pastel shades of these colors. And I decided to completely change one of the colors, instead of yellow I used purple. It will most likely still look like the dot candy but slightly more personalized to the colors that I like.

 

                                             

I am continuing to create and place dots on my project. After doing about one side of the box I ran out of the dots that I made so I had to roll a slab and cut out cubes to make more of them. I am using the same process of scoring and slipping three dots at a time. As I have been doing this I have improved on smoothing out the dots, and I have learned that using a wet sponge is really the best way to do it. It is a little challenging to keep my project from getting to dry because it is taking me a while to to attach the dots. I try to keep wet paper towels wrapped around it while I am not working on it, and also spray it with water when needed. After about two weeks I finally finished all of the dots, a hundred and twenty in total. While observing what I have done, I noticed a few imperfections. Some of the dots were smaller or larger that other, some of the rows were uneven, and the biggest one of all is that one of the sides of the box is bigger than the others. Overall I am happy with how it is turnuing out, now it is off to be fired and then glazed.

 

After deciding to get rid of my previous idea for this project, I had to think of a new one. Since the point of this project is to tell a story, I looked though the pictures on my phone. I came across one of me standing in front of this wall in a restaurant in Los Angeles, the wall was covered in a wallpaper that looked like the candy called “Candy Buttons”. I wanted to incorporate this candy into my project. After looking through some pottery magazines I found this vase that was covered in sphere forms. I really liked how clean it looked and also that it could be useful. I decided to combine this with the candy idea and make a cube that is covered in these candies, and the top of the cube would be open so that I could put things in it. To do a little bit of research I went out and bought these candy buttons. I used them to look at the color pattern and also the rows and columns of the candy to see how many dots I would put on the cube. I rolled out a slab and cut 6x6in squares. I worked on smoothing the form for a while and then began to work on the dots. To make sure that they were all the same size I rolled a slab and cut little squares that were 1cm across and then rolled them into balls. Then I sliced those in half using a wire tool because it cause a lot less resistance than a knife. Now I am currently working to attach all of the dots to the sides of the cube.