I haven't tried a larger piece of work for a while since I've mainly been working on throwing & glaze calc in class, but I had the day off yesterday, so I figured I'd have another go at it. After watching some videos online, I decided the best way to go about it would be to coil build rather than slab work as I had done before. Here are some pics of the process~
It was all going quite well until this point- until I got to the head. I always have such trouble with the head on larger pieces. I don't know exactly why this is. In my mind's eye, I can see where I want to go, but it just doesn't translate from my mind to my hands to the clay. Total time spent on this piece was about 11 hours. At least 1/2 of that time was spent on the neck & head, as I added & subtracted features & texture.
It was getting late & I still had a lot of clean-up to do to get my kitchen cleaned up & in functional order, so rather than tear the head apart again, I decided to call it good at this point.
I'm actually not even sure whether or not I'll fire this guy, or put him in the recycle bucket. He's about 2 feet long & 10 inches high, and I'm not sure how my instructors will respond to me wanting to take up so much kiln space since I'm not taking a sculptural class this semester. Also, I built him w/ a clay body better suited to throwing... it's a softer clay w/ less grog, and I am not sure how it would hold up. I do, however, want to continue making these sculptures this semester, though I plan on going about 1/2 this size... I want to keep practicing until I get something I really like so that when I formulate a really cool glaze in my glaze calculation class I can create a truly unique piece.
