Inked Up

We started doing some ink drawing to reflect our pieces and to maybe inspire future pieces and designs. I enjoyed doing this and in return the drawings helped inspire one of the pieces I made for the raku firing!

 

Ceramics Pieces

Decided on some of the shapes and designs I wanted to work with I got started making these pieces so here are some of them:

 

The Wheel

We got the opportunity to use the wheel the other day which was well... an experience! I enjoyed it and would love to get the chance to practice some more using it and getting the technique right but I guess the first time is always tricky. Thankfully, Elaine gave us a step by step run through on it (and then when we still seemed unsure she gave another) so just when we felt a little more sure it was our turn. One of the hardest parts may have been mounting the wheel, along with centring the piece and keeping it steady, its takes a lot more muscle than you'd think!

Developing Ideas

From the first series of pieces we made in the beginning we had to select 1 piece to continue working with and so I chose this piece:

 

We then had to explore the potential of the form and develop it further. I decided to explore what the shape would look like upside down, with textures and various sizes;

 

Here is an image of those pieces I made by developing on my initial idea;

Ceramics!!

Last monday I began my two week journey of ceramics! First off we were given a brief some clay and an intriguing quote to work from. The aim was to make a few 3D pieces within half an hour, as good a way to kick off as any! So here are snaps of my first few:

 

These were one or two of my favourites;

 

 

And here is the one piece i decided to keep and work from;

Crumpeling Clay

 I wanted to use a different medium to portray my crumpled leaf veins pieces through. I wanted to experiment a bit with trying to get the right textures and effects so I started with the bag of clay that had been resting itself on my desk for the past few weeks. I put the techniques that I had learned from Elaine's 3D workshop to use and got started!

In the 3D workshop that I took with Elaine a few weeks ago we used a heavy duty grease proof paper to get a certain texture in the clay like this:

This was the kind of texture I was looking to achieve again, so starting off I rolled out my slabs of clay and began to texture but I noticed after using the one piece of grease proof paper the texture would not repeat again the paper became useless. To overcome this I did my crumpeling technique with some sheets of paper as I do to create my pieces like this:

And I discovered this was very effective in creating my desired pattern, and this is how it turned out:

Being happy with this I kept texturing slabs, being more and more daring making the slabs bigger each time! By the end I had about 5 slabs, so I picked up my courage and started doing the tricky bit... which was to make the slabs resemble crumpled up paper. After awhile (and a few ripped and pieced back together) slabs later this is what I had:

 

I'm quite happy with how the pieces turned out and hope I have time to get them fired before the Xmas Holliers!

 

Leaf Piece (Cabbagey)

 

I made this wall piece using the space behind my desk, I hope to turn it into a mini instillation experiment before going home for Christmas! I had been trying out different methods and colours and stuff with my crumpled paper for awhile and I wanted to turn it into something... bigger! (Macro even). I had all these loo roll holders hanging around (I sort of collect them, it drives everyone crazy 'coz I tend to give out if I find them in the bin :P hehe), lets face it when you're an art student you absolutely never know when things like this could come in handy! I used these loo roll holders as my main veins in my piece (if you look closely at the back of a leaf you'll notice how the bigger veins stick out but the littler ones you can only see) and I used my crumpled paper for the inbetween veins and made it BIG, its the size of the wall: (which ok, isn't so big but it's big enough)

I began by painting like 6 or 8 A1 sheets different greens and different speckles and stuff.. (really trying to get in touch with my inner 'nature').
















Then I used my hot glue gun to merge all the loo roll holders together and stuck them to the wall and all the paper pieces were brought into the equation.

It was difficult trying to get the paper to stay on the wall so unfortunately there was some hot glue involved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm happy with how my little piece turned out... However.. It does rather resemble a leaf of cabbage for some reason :/ but I still like it :)