When I made my tree, I cut a fairly long length of wire, placed the rock in the middle, then wrapped both sides of the wire up around the rock. From there, I just twisted them until I was satisfied with the length of the "trunk". I did this several times to beef up the trunk a bit, then took the loose pieces at the top of the tree and bent them in different directions to give a canopy effect. I didn't want my tree to be super big, so I kept a more small and endearing style. Since the wires were slipping around the rock, I used some E6000 to tack them down. If I were to do this project again, I would try to find a bigger rock so it wouldn't be so hard to work with.
For this project, we started by rolling out a slab of clay to form around a styrofoam tray. Each person's tray was slightly different, so some people had circular ones instead of rectangular ones. After we were sure that the slab was wide enough to cover the tray, we smoothed the clay down around the tray. We let the clay dry just a little, then started painting on the black underglaze. We put on two to three coats of underglaze depending on how dark we wanted the black to be, and once all the coats dried, we used a needle tool to carve away the underglaze into our desired design. Once the designs were complete, we fired the pieces, dipped them in a clear glaze, then fired them again. I think the most successful part of my piece is the texture I achieved in the hair and the eyebrows. If I were to do it again, I would paint more coats of underglaze and would have spent a little more time making sure her face was proportionally correct and not crooked. I think I was introduced to the concept of taking away the highlights in a piece during this project, which was a technique I would later use with scratchboard.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2016
Categories |