Intentions

Pottery Project Intentions

For this pottery project, I want to make a basic conga style drum.  I like how smooth and polished the drums appear when they are made out of wood, so I want to make sure my clay drum has the same smooth qualities.  However, I also want to play around with the form of the drum.  I still want it to be tall and narrow, but I also want to play around with the shape, such as slightly denting in the sides to give it a more complex figure.  My inspiration for this drum comes from both historic African style drums (left) as well as modern conga drums (right).


I also want to successfully spin a ceramic bowl or cup on the pottery wheel.  For this, I don't have any specific intentions on what I want to make yet, but I would like it to have some sort of everyday purpose which I could use, such as a cereal bowl or a drinking cup.  

Finally, I would like to make one or two maracas out of clay.  I was inspired to do this after seeing some maracas in a music video.  I like the unique sound they make based on the shape and size of the material inside of the chamber.  After doing some research, I found that I want to make them with a smooth transition between the handle and body of the instrument (see picture below).  It would also be interesting to adjust the form of the instrument in a similar way that I would for the drum.
 

Big Love Sculpture

1. To create an overall plan for the sculpture, the entire class put their ideas together.  For example, me and a couple other students had the idea of having a man pillar make up the fountain, as apposed to a wall or arch.  Our idea was selected to be in the main design and it was fun to see our idea transform from a thought to the actual sculpture.
2. Overall, A stage-piece doesn't have to be completely perfect in the sense that every square millimeter doesn't have to be uniform.  Because the audience is further away, the props can be painted a main color, the covered with different blotches of colors.  The different colors then blend together and make the stone tiles look weathered.  I was most engaged when my group was working on making the overall base.  It was fun to use tools to make something bigger than the boxes from the last project.
3. Overall, the meeting a the beginning of the project was successful because everyone was able to give ideas for the main project.  People could give ideas, modify other ideas, or do both.  Everybody participated and entire class worked well together.
4. I was really happy because I was able to pick my group.  I chose to be in the group that made the base because I wanted to do mostly woodworking.  I was happy that I learned how to use some new power tools.
5. The overall base is the most successful part of my groups work.  We made it sturdy so it can hold the weight of a couple of people.  However, the most successful looking element that my group participated in was the tiles.  The tiles look really convincing from a distance through our painting technique.  We mixed different shades to make the stone look weathered.
6. My group was constantly giving itself feedback along the way.  We were always changing elements of the base to make it as successful as possible.  I think the sculpture as a whole looks great, especially for the short time period.

Sculpture Blog Link

Here is the link to my sculpture blog: http://radsculptures.blogspot.com/

Final Reflection

1. Overall, my two most successful works were sculpture works.  I was able to expand my creativity when I was able to use my knowledge of different materials and tools. My two best sculpture projects were the collage and the humanoid figure.
2. These were my most successful projects because I was able to expand my creativity with my knowledge of the materials and tools. This allowed me to experiment more with my art so I had the most successful pieces of work.
3.  My least successful pieces of art were my Ipod paintings. Because the expirement was to change the colors in the paintings, They ended up looking bad because the colors did not agree with one another, making the paintings look extremely unrealistic.  Knowing this, I would have chosen a different object to photograph.
4. My greatest strength in art is my ability to quickly learn how a tool or material works so I can then start expirementing with it.  This leads me to make my most successful works.  Sculpture is usually better for me because there are more tools to work with, also leading me to have more fun.
5. During some projects I showed more intrest than others.  For example, If we had been doing a project for two weeks, like the Ipod paintings, I would loose intrest and my effort would start going down.  However, my effort was always maxed out if we were working on something that had a new sort of medium because I was always intrested in learning about how some new material or tool works.
6. I am excited to go into sculpture next year because, even though I enjoyed this class, I am happy to only do sculpture works and not drawing or painting.
7. Learning to use new tools helps in the real world with learning new things in classes.  I think this is a good model for learning an I will try to apply it to school.

Landscape

Landscape

Overall, this was an interesting project.  I liked how we were able to work in the darkroom with different tints and shades and then be able to go outside and work on line quality and structure with ink.  This variety made this project better than others as we were also able to develop our own photos.  I tried to focus on trees with the ink drawings.  Trees have are unique because every tree has different line qualities that can be translated into an ink pen or brush.  With the darkroom shots I was disappointed because my camera was broken so I could pick from 4 shots that developed properly.  I tried to focus on overall landscape with these.  I was interested in getting the treelines and to see how the ground molded and flowed.

Figure Reflection

Sculpture Reflection

1. I wasn't really thinking of "metamorphosis" during my project.  I was thinking more on how the the project had to be abstract but still be humanoid.
2. By doing this project, I pushed myself to understand plaster more.  I realized that the consistency of the plaster has a big effect on how some tools work.  The higher the concentration, the more force is needed cut the plaster.
3. Over the course of the project, my intentions changed from making a more humanoid sculpture to make an abstract figure that looked slightly humanoid.  This came after realizing how much more an abstract sculpture stretches the brain as a apposed to an obvious human sculpture.
4. Overall, I was happy with how I used the plaster because It was effective and efficient.  I wouldn't change my approach.

Sculpture Pictures