It's Been A While...

I've been slacking with my posts, I know.  I can't help it!  We were in Virginia all weekend, and I was really busy trying to catch up on the work I missed.  Now we've got a four-day weekend (thanks to the Jewish holidays, something unheard of in Kentucky...), so I'm going to make up all my work and maybe even get ahead in some things!

Well, that's the plan anyway.  We'll see if it works out.

Let me see, where did I leave off?  I guess I'll start with ceramics.

I am REALLY behind in my ceramics class.  Every time I try to make something and I don't like how it's turning out, I just smush it all back together and try to start over.  The problem here is that I don't like anything I'm making!  So I have nothing really to show for my work.  The only thing I have is this, my "manipulated slab:"

  

I do like this one.  I like the texture, how it kind of looks almost rocky.  And I was happy with how the changes in the profile turned out.  My only problem here is that it dried soooo quickly.  When I tried to make a bottom for it, the top part cracked off!  I had to put strips of wet newspaper on it to get it a little damper so I could reconnect the pieces.

Today I caught up on our last project, which was making a piece with slabs again.  We had to cut out a profile and then connect all the pieces so it's like a little box/vase thing.  If I'm gonna be honest, I don't care about this specific project.  I'm just doing it so I don't get an "Incomplete."  Instead, I'll get a check mark.  Hmm...I guess this is one of the reasons why I'm feeling more and more like I'm in elementary school.

Tuesday we're starting on the wheel!  I'm really excited for that.  I used the pottery wheel once in high school but the pot I made just looked like a giant egg, it wasn't nice.  So this time, I'll make it count.

Ceramics

Now I've realized that I've been focusing so much on my drawing class that I'm forgetting to talk about my other classes.

Ceramics is pretty fun.  The first day we learned how to wedge the clay (getting all the air bubbles out so it won't explode in the kiln) and we made little pinch pots with our fingers (none of which I kept, because let's face it, I made a better one when I was eleven and it's not cute to keep every piece of art you make anymore).  The next class we started on a coil pot, which was just stacking piles of coils on top of each other.  Mine was terrrribleeee.  I hated it.  I wanted it to look like a beehive but it just turned out terrible.

Yesterday we started making pots out of slabs of clay.  You know how some words just sound like exactly what they are?  Like, jelly.  Or fizz.  That's how I think of slab.  There's no other way to describe it than just as a big slab of clay.

So we have a slab of clay that we kind of have to twist together and make a pot, put texture on it, change the profile.  It's kind of hard to describe, but I'll take a picture next week to show it.

My professor, though, is a hoot.  She's kind of quirky and I think she thinks that she's really funny and clever, but she's just kind of zany.  She was telling us an idea she had for a party where everyone would hot glue styrofoam to their shoes so all the short people can be the same height as the tall people.
Then she said, "Yeah, but I'd probably get sued if someone tripped."

Yeah, that's the worst part of that idea.