Recall that in the first class we made a lot of little pieces – or at least I made a lot of little pieces. At least one of my classmates came in knowing exactly what she wanted to do, and so she made a small model, a maquette, just to figure out the particulars. I came into the second class still not sure what I wanted to do for my larger piece, but with roosters on the brain. I spent the beginning of that class making a new maquette.

The instructor helped me build an armature of PVC pipe in a T shape, which was excellent for support but did make the crouching position basically impossible – the body really had to be completely horizontal. Oh well, working within constraints is often more interesting than working without them. The first night’s work produced this:

The next week when I arrived I was not very pleased with my work in progress. Lengthening the beak made an enormous difference in my opinion, all by itself. After I did a little work on it, the instructor helped me take the armature out, but we found the clay inside was too sloppy still for hollowing the bird and expecting it not to collapse. Removing the armature required cutting the bird in half chin to tail and then stitching it back together again. Since the clay was still fairly soft, we had to support the bird’s head. Here’s the end of two nights’ work:

The fourth and final night of class, my third night of work on the bird, he had to be sliced in half again to make room to scoop out a lot of the interior clay. The thicker the clay, the longer it takes to dry and the more likely it is to dry unevenly. Again we violently slashed back and forth across the cut line to make sure the clay was thoroughly stitched together so it wouldn’t crack in the kiln later. I then did the final detailing, filled in low spots, and smoothed over rough patches with the newly available clay. I’ll go back with a piece of sandpaper and some other things probably a week from tomorrow and see if it’s dry enough yet to really smooth the surface.

Dry time is probably a good six weeks, but hopefully I will have a third post about glazing and firing this beastie!

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The first piece was a sort of mask, which I essentially made just as a doodle. The teacher had suggested, if we did not have an idea in mind, that we just lump clay together and mold it with no particular goal, and that similarly to how clouds will resolve themselves into shapes when one looks at them long enough, we might start to see little figures to draw out. Our “inner gargoyle,” he said. This is not my inner gargoyle, but I like it.

Second I started working on one of the few ideas I’d had prior to class: a winged toad with a satisfied grin. It did not turn out as planned. It turned out better than planned.

I was starting to run dry of ideas, and the next thing I made started out as a tall ghostly creature with arms. I briefly thought about making a Hattifattener, but ended up with a horse-like dragon.

The teacher was speaking to a woman next to me about her sculpture and mentioned something about owls. I was inspired to make an owl, odd as he might be.

Here is another view of the four pieces so far.

Finally, there was about an hour left in class, and I had a big lump of clay and no more ideas. I started pushing it around, and after going through a Mahna Mahna backup singer type piece, I produced this:

Incidentally, the only real gargoyle I made is the last piece – technically, a gargoyle is a waterspout, eliminating runoff damage to masonry by shooting water away from the building. If it’s not a waterspout, but it’s on the building, it’s a grotesque.

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Here are the decapitated dispensers. I made some spares in case I needed them. The original heads were football helmets and characters from the movie Cars.

And here are the recapitated dispensers!

He is a computer engineer and loves photography, to the point that he started a side business photographing weddings and other events. He love to bike and do other (nonmotorized) racing sports. He and his wife have a boat that they use as often as possible in the summer, which I tried but failed to replicate in clay. I could have drawn from his hobby of woodworking or the fact that he’s a great cook, but those both seemed harder to capture in Pez head form.

All of the dispensers do still work, although I realized on his birthday – two days after shipping – that I completely forgot to include the candy in the package.

Here are some more angles. From the top you can see the tread I cut into the tire, and to my surprise, the vent lines I cut into the computer monitor. From the side/back you can see that the computer is a Macintosh, with the power button on the right near the back.

Best of all, he loved them. Happy birthday, big bruvver!

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The first step of the project, which cannot be revealed right now because it would give the whole thing away, happened way back in the late summer or early fall. I was waiting for the next steps until I’d finished my SF embroidery, figuring it would be better to concentrate on one thing at a time. I did, however, get out a lot of materials the last weekend of stitching.

I wanted to do four figures, but apparently I have no idea what a boat looks like. I tried several times, looking at pictures in between, and still, no. It’s a shoe! It’s a bicycle seat! It’s an arrowhead! So, there were three, two in clay + mirror and one in clay + wire.

The wire one was maybe going to be a piece of a commercial toy, but I couldn’t find anything that looked like what I wanted: a bicycle tire. So I wound some wire around a small rod and around part of a large funnel, and then used smaller wire to make spokes between them. That was a pain.

The ones with mirrors were a computer and a camera. The camera, in fact, ended up with two mirrors: one for the lens and one for the viewscreen on the back. The computer had a mirror for the monitor screen. These were surprisingly unpainful to make. Here’s a picture of the three figures after baking:

I didn’t have any black clay so I painted the camera and tire after baking them. Fortunately you can still see the tread on the tire, sliced in with a utility knife. The vent slots on the computer monitor, however, disappeared when I painted that figure with pearly white paint. Oh well! I used a bent wire to clean the paint off the mirrors after it dried – the bottom of the U.

The bicycle tire is set up to actually spin, though I can’t show you that picture until the big reveal. This entailed some time at the hardware store looking at all the options (fortunately one of the guys who works there was very enthusiastic about this project and helped produce ideas), but worked out pretty well and with minimal cutting and bending of wire.

Until Monday!

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