Part of what has kept me so tied up is an art class that I am taking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts-- it is called Fundamentals of 2D Design and it takes up a couple evenings per week worth of class time and several other evenings of my week worth of homework time. It is the first class of the SMFA's Illustration Certificate Program, in which I am now enrolled! I am very excited about working towards my Illustration Certificate and it really feels like I'm moving forward! Once my class finishes up, I will make a post about the work I did!
Another way in which I feel like I am moving forward is with ceramics. In a recent post, I said I thought I was stagnating, which was true at the time-- I wanted to finish up my ceramics class really fast so that I could get on to some new paintings (which are in the works). What ended up happening was that I was left with only a few days left of my ceramics class and a TON of clay. I am not one to waste clay, so I thought, "How can I use as much of this clay as I can in as short an amount of time as possible?" That it when I came up with an outpour of new work! I just got ideas and went with them. I think that is a great and effective way to be creative.
I also usually spend a lot of time picking out glazes ; new glazes, new combinations of glazes, the perfect glazes, unique glazes for each individual piece. But this time, I decided just to glaze pretty much everything with the same glaze combo, one that I already know I like. The blue glaze is called pseudo-celadon and the brown is waterfall brown.
Using uniform glazes make the pieces look like a set even though they are actually not very similar except that they're bowls. It is hard to tell in these photos, but the first bowl is significantly larger than the second, and obviously the second bowl has my heron stamp. Making work that feels like a set is something that I also had not been able to achieve before in ceramics, so that feels great too!
Speaking of my heron stamp, I started using it in other ways as well, like in these slab-built cups!
The glazes on the first cup are yellow-whose-name-I-forgot and midnight blue:
On the following cup, instead of midnight I used a glaze called "Susan's Mistake Blue" which I have used before, but I had never used so much of it (I dipped it twice this time). I guess this glaze has a tendency to crawl, which is the effect you see where the glaze didn't exactly stick everywhere. I guess we found out what Susan's mistake was.
I kinda like it anyway though.
I also made a bunch of heron tiles:
What else did I make? Oh yes, this cup is awesome! And the glaze around the top is what happens when you only dip Susan's Mistake once. It is nice when it doesn't crawl! I used slip (liquidy clay) to make the swirly designs.
And the next bowl, well, I think someone bumped it while it was drying, which is how it got that dent, but it is ok because I glazed it to look like a crescent moon:
I'm super happy with my crescent moon bowl.
Aaaand finally, I wanted to have another try at something sculptural so I made a lady with birds on her head. The glaze was an experiment. I think it turned out ok. She used to have longer hair, but she looked a little too little-mermaid. Not that I have anything against the little mermaid... but I don't really need my work to look like Disney so I gave her a haircut that kinda looks like mine.
Next week-- a post about 2-D Design!
