This is the first piece out of twelve that I will be making based on the theme of society and how it's always around since day one of your life. For this piece I made it out of clay using molds that contained various baby parts. I had to attach the legs, arms and head to the body. That was a long, fragile process to get the baby to be all connected. The baby head was a bit big so I had to open the body out a little more so the baby didn't look like a bobble head. For the words on the back of the baby I used alphabet soup that burned away in the bisque kiln. I then proceeded to paint the baby a pink color to symbol a girl (me) an to show how innocent a baby is, how clean they are. For the paper boat it is the recurring item that will be seen throughout the project.
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For this Piece I greatly enjoyed doing it. For whatever reason I like to work with wire and tubing things. I used a new tool that I have never worked with before and it helped me in so many ways. I used a pipe cutter, it's a small piece that fits in your hands and surprsingly cuts the pipe with ease and doesn't even hurt you... well I mean it could but it's not likely. With this piece I worked it like I have done all the others, improvising. When it comes to Abstract art I am not the one to really plan it, I rather just allow myself to work through it. I used Copper Pipes, small that is nothing hudge, to make shapes, the same shape that is. Only I started big and it got smaller as it went in. I really do hope I can continue making Abstract pieces in my later life because I do enjoy them greatly. For this project I had to make a vessel piece, so of course I made a trey, I am not very good with bowls. By making a trey I used a mold to get the shape of it. After making the actual base of the trey I went on to use scrafito for the designing part of the trey. I went with a tree because I love the beauty that trees give off in the world. I wanted to do a tea set to go along with it but I did not have enough time to do that. It turned out very sleek which was what I was going for, overall I was happy with the outcome. For this project I was assigned to make a relief square. I could make this square as big as I wanted it to be. Go big or go home, but in this case I kept within my set skills by doing a medium sized rectangle. At the time that I was figuring out my design my favorite show called Once Upon a Time was airing it's new season. That is when I got the idea to do a swan after the main characters middle name, Emma Swan. Also, once I had the idea of a swan I knew I could do so much with it. I carved the clay away around the swan to get the basic outline of it. I wanted to give the piece a water ripple look so I decided to have the water ripple around the swan. After I built the swan up to give that a more 3D visual than the rest of the piece. Once I was finished with the clay part and it was put into the Bisque kiln I had to paint it by using glaze. Since glaze is shiny I thought it was appropriate to use that for the water ripples. I went with an ombre, blues all the way to a grey to give the water more depth. I then proceeded to add more to the piece by melting glass in between the ripples to give it more of an effect. I am very proud of how this piece turned out. The last time I did a square piece it was just hideous, I hated it. Redeeming myself with a relief piece, I think I did better with this one because I was working with a bigger space making it easier to add in the designs I wanted.Overall I enjoyed making it and glad on how it turned out. For this piece I made this out of nails and Styrofoam balls.I used skewers to connect the Styrofoam, since Styrofoam chips away so easily I covered the skewers with hot glue to help keep it in place. I did the same thing for connecting the nails. I spray painted each ball with the nails in tact before attaching them.Once they were all connected I went back to touch it up, after I painted the tips of the nails a different color to add more to is. Once I was done with the main piece I didn't know how I wanted to display this. It was notoriously heavy to stand up on it's own. My dad had a plastic holder that displays a baseball. He gave it to me to try and use as a stand. I spray painted it to match the piece and surprisingly enough the piece balanced on it. I did not glue this piece to the stand at all, it balances on it's own. For this project I thought of matches when I was told to make a Dwelling, it's wooden like a house and I could do so much with it. I knew from the start I was going to have at least one house lit on fire, to give it a burned look. I had no idea how many I would make but as I started drawing it out I got an idea on how many. I wanted to stack some of the houses on one another, to really show the meaning and to show off the houses all together instead of stacking them side by side. I wanted the message for this to show that there are broken homes even in the best of neighborhoods. You don't have to live in the slums to come from a broken home. So I made sure that some two of the houses are perfect, the middle house will be completely burned and then the other two houses will be partly burned to show that a home can easily break, you don't have to be born into it. The process for this was absolutely dreadful, finding a way to hot glue tiny matches together was awful. Especially when you decide to pre burn the matches for the one house they crumble under your grip, even the softest of grips. Burning all the matches stank up the house, because some of the matches had to be burned all the way. Getting them to stick together I ended up taking parchment paper then used hot glue putting a strip of glue down then set the matches down side by side. I had to work fast before the hot glue turned cold. Then the glue peels right off and I have a strip of matches for a wall. Hot glue is hard to work with using such a small median. I ended up burning myself twice which hurt, but I stuck through and got all the houses done. Making the roof was the second hardest part because I had to put a support beam inside the houses to have a spot to glue the bottom of the roof in. Overall it turned out better than I thought it would. This is the finish piece!!! Room of Requirement...get it... It's Required of me to use many, many tools when it comes to clay making and sculpting of all kinds. There was the clay wire, the rib tool and so many more. The tools can help to cutting the clay, to making the actual piece or even smoothing it down for the finish product. There are some tools that add texture to the piece to make the piece unique in every way. The one tool that I found strange but very useful was a spoon. I know, I know, a spoon is used for soup or my favorite, ice cream. In the world of sculpting it can be used for smoothing out a clay piece, I found myself using many times. I chose to talk about this tool because it was out of the ordinary showing that you can use just about anything in the world of sculpting. Using the back of the spoon and rubbing it over the clay piece smooths it out giving it a polished look. It helped my pieces by giving it a finished look, and making it look...well nice. Growing with the knowledge about different uses of clay tools have helped me in the class. When I ask what tool to use for this piece and they give me a name I can picture the tool in my head and go from there. Whereas the beginning people were throwing out names making me helplessly confused. It even makes my clay piece turn out much better to learn about different tools to smooth out the bumps or even an easier way to roll the lump of clay out. This will help me a lot when I carry on next year with Sculpture two and AP sculpture soon followed after that. This way I don't have to bug people with twenty questions on what is what and where is where.
.What is your least favorite material to work with and why? How did you deal with it, what didn’t you like about it. Please explain. Believe it or not I hate working with clay with a pure passion. I specifically said back in art 3 that I would never take sculpture class...like ever. The thing is though I hated Tech Theater much more so I decided to try sculpture out anyways.The first piece we did was a clay tile that turned out awful. Then we made a pit fire piece which of course we had to use clay for that. Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful, but clay, I am just really bad at it. Somethings people are just naturally bad at and clay is one of those things for me. I even tried making a bowl on the Wheel, it turned into a cup. My luck with clay just isn't the best. I dealt with it by trying to see how I could make it easier and painless. Yes, painless, I cut myself on someones clay piece which was was finished. I also discovered this beautiful thing called a molding. When I did the vessel project I was shown how to do a plate. After seeing how to do it I was in love with doing it. I even made a baby head near the end of the school year, again I used a mold. So next time I do a clay piece I will hunt down a mold or something to use to make the form. But I will say, I never want to make another bowl again, it's just boring to me and a bit stressful.
Scraffito is like using a glaze but scratching away the stuff that is pointless to you. Doing that makes the picture on the plate show up. First you flatten a big slab of clay out then turning that into whatever piece you want to make. A tray in this case. Then you use the scraffito, in this case it's black, then paint the whole entire thing, several layers of it. After you let it dry and all you start to carve away the design that you wish to have on your piece. Once that is all done you but it in the bisque kiln to harden the tray and set it all in place. After that is all done you take it out letting it cool then going back and repainting all the nicks in the tray(then fire it again in the bisque). Then you dump it in clear glaze, accept the bottom of course. Then it goes back into the kiln but this time you put it in the...GLAZE KILN!!! So cool right (just say right). What came out the best is the tray, it didn't crack or break or anything. Even the picture that I did turned out pretty amazing. I would do differently is to try and make the edges smooth and not so wavy and bumpy. Maybe even try a simpler pattern on the plate to make it much smoother and elegant looking. I already have done Scraffito but each time I still learn something different. Smooth out the tray next time, or pick a simpler picture to transfer onto the plate. Be more careful when trimming the extra clay off. In the end it is still my favorite part of the whole class, I don't know why but it just is. For the tree you have to have at least nine wire strands three times the size you want the tree to be. Then at the ends you twist it several places at the bottom to make it look like it has roots. Very carefully you start twisting the pieces together forming the trunk of the tree. The more you go up you can start by adding branches, breaking some of the wires off twisting them into a branch. In the end it turns out so beautiful, you can chose whatever base you want then planting the tree on top with more wire to keep it in place.
One thing it looks like a tree and I was able to get it to stand on the brick that I chose. What didn't happen was the tree itself looked kind of wimpy almost. The branches were not intertwined very well making the branches look off. I would fix the branches when I do it again and I most likely will be making a second yet bigger tree. |
AuthorArt done by Shelby Johnson, Blog by same art maker. Archives
February 2017
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