Sculptural Concentration #5

For the 5th and final project of my plant concentration, I created a clay slab and carved out a sunflower. I was inspired by pinterest and I really like to focus on making sunflowers especially in all different ways with different materials. Clay is a material that I am familiar with however I've never made a slab design and I thought it was a really cool idea and something fun and different from what I usually do with clay.

To begin with, I cut off a square slab of clay and then smoothed it out. I went in with a clay tool and lightly traced where I was going to make the sunflower and the rest I was going to carve out which was the negative space. I carefully carved out each space between the flower pedals and tried to make them each as smooth as I could. After that I grabbed another small slab of clay and roll it into a ball and then flattened it. I sculpted the head of the sunflower and then attached it to the middle where the head would go. I then poked holes in it to add texture to it. After that it went to be brisk fire. Once the brisk fire was complete I wanted to try to use oil pastel on my project because I wanted to try something new and I liked the way it looked. However when I went to use the yellow oil pastel, it came out in a black-brownish color and I didnt like the texture. I wanted to to use glaze instead but realized I cannot do that because the kiln will only take the glaze but there was oil pastel under it. So the alternative for this was to use acrylic paint. I normally like to use acrylic paint but in the end I didn't think it looked as pleasing as I had hoped.

Overall, I actually do really like this piece however there are some struggle I had and some things I wish that came out better. One thing I had a lot of trouble with was when I was painting, I had trouble getting in all the nooks and crannies. Which in then end made the resulting piece not look as best as I wish it had. If I were to do this project again I would make the the head of the sunflower bigger and smooth out the negative space of the clay better. Also know exactly what material I am going to use after it is fired.