Sgraffito Animal

The subject of my creation is a penguin from Chile. As it is a freestanding sculpture of the subject, I don’t know if this counts as the background, but I created a design of fish and bubbles on the primarily black and primarily white sections of the penguin. I made this by molding clay into little balls, then, I created a pinch pot. After that, I created a neck with a thin cylinder of clay. Later, I added on the head, wings, and feet. After I was done molding it, I painted three layers of sgraffito paint, and I scratched it off. Then it was put in the kiln and I added three layers of glaze to make it shiny. I used the line to show shape. Form to show form, and line to show value and texture.

In this piece, I decided to use formal balance because the penguin is symmetrical. I used leading lines. First, I created a form from clay, but I decided that it wasn't working great because the bottom was flat and much thicker than the rest of the pinch pot. After that, I added on the head, beak, wings, legs, and feet. Later, I painted it and scraped it off using a tool.

The meaning/story behind this sculpture is that I went on a trip to Chile and I saw some of these penguins. Right away, I knew that I wanted to do a sculpture of them. This project relates to my life because I've wanted to do something with clay for a while, and although there was a bit of a learning curve, I'm very happy with the result, and I think I improved a lot. But there are some things that I would change if I could:

• It is not symmetrical when you look at it from the front
• It is not entirely smooth
• The beak has a weird shape
• Some of the fish don't have eyes or are weirdly shaped
• It does not sit on it's feet.
• In the places where the pattern goes from the light section to a dark section, it changes weirdly
• The plant looks weird and does not fit in well
• The bubbles' reflection does not work