Project 3

To start this project I began by throwing over 10 forms that were at least 6 inches in diameter.

From there some of the thrown forms would be used to create four bowls that had to relate to one another. For this, I played around with a couple of different styles, sizes, and textures which you can see from the above photos, but ended up liking the pedaled edges. I decided to make four small plant holders adding draining holes to the bottom.

Unfortunately, the clay I had thrown with at first was very unpredictable. I had several pieces dry up within two days despite being wrapped up and sprayed. In the same bag, thrown at the same time, I had a few pieces collapse on themselves from being too wet. I ended up switching to a different bag of clay, mixing in the really wet collapsed pieces with the dryer clay, and re-throwing one of my pedal pieces as well as more forms to build with for the third part of this assignment.

For my pedal pieces, I researched several glazes on glazy and mixed one of my own, which I was very excited about since it was only my third time making my own glaze.

Moving on to the third part of the project I ran into a lot of difficulties. As I had mentioned the blows I had leftover from my original 10 had all either dried out or collapsed. So I had to start from scratch and re-throw two new forms to build with. After I had my two forms I quickly build a tall form and created a lid and handle for it.

Throughout this project, while throwing and planning I had been listening to the audiobook Howls moving castle. I had grown up watching the studio ghibli adaption but it was my first time listening to the book version. It had a lot of differences from the movie that I liked, and I knew I wanted to create my pieces loosely inspired by the book and movie. This is one of the reasons I did flower pedal bowls for part b of the project. As flowers play a role throughout the story. From wax flowers being used in the hat shop to the field of beautiful flowers later in the book to the flower shop they eventually open. Throughout the story, Sophie talks to the flowers, and that changes and affects how they grow. The flower pot with pedals in a purplish glaze was sort of meant to represent Sophie and her nurturing nature and her unsuspecting magic. The planting pot is often overlooked when thinking about what contributes to a plant’s growth. Similar to Sophie’s magic throughout the book. She doesn’t realize the impact she has, or how she is the one shaping the environment that allows the plant to grow. She always assumes it’s the work of the sun soil and water and doesn’t realize how she contributes.

The lidded form I based around Howl and Calcifers magic. I didn’t mix my own glazes for this. Instead layering underglazes and experimenting with carving away the top layers to reveal more colors underneath. I took one of the dryer bowls that didn’t collapse but was to dry to build with and used this as my experiment before applying it to my bigger bowl. You can see how I had adjusted how I placed the color when I went to the final form. I also added a lot more layers to the final form as I felt it was to easy to carve away the glaze completely on the test.

Unfortunately even with adding more layers the underglaze carved away super easily. Even using different tools both wood, metal, and plastic. What was interesting was certain glazes stayed better then others. The red and green carved away almost entirely, while yellow and orange had better success staying. It was really hard to refill the carved away parts as I didn’t have a paint brush small enough. I attempted to fill in the glaze with both a needle tool and a small brush.