Sgraffito Animal

For this assignment, the task was to sculpt any sort of animal out of clay. For this, I chose to to create a panda bear. Firstly, I chose to make a giraffe. I wanted to make a clay giraffe because giraffes are my favorite animals. However, I began to have trouble when sculpting the body, so I then decided to make a bear, specifically a panda bear.

The only materials I needed for the first part of this project was clay. I began by cutting of a semi thick slab of clay and then begin to roll it out and form a shape of a ball. Next I made a hole in the center of the medium sized ball and began pinching the sides to start creating a pinch pot like figure. After a while of pinching and smoothing the shape out, it started to look like the body of an animal, however is was not looking like a giraffes body and more like a bear. At this point I decided that I was going to make a bear instead because I couldn't find an easier way to sculpt a giraffes body. After the body was complete, I moved on to making the head of the bear. To do this I sculpted another pinch pot like figure and scratched and attached it to the body following up with smoothing it out. When the head and body was complete, I went in with smoothing tools and smoothed out every part of the pandas body as possible. After that all I really needed to do was just sculpt all the body parts like the arms, legs, ears, etc. Once my panda was completed, I put glaze on it and then let it dry overnight. After that, I used the clay tools to scratch out a design on the pandas back, shown above. Finally, when all of that was done, I used clear glaze to go over my sculpture with three coats to make it have a shiny effect.

Overall, I am very proud with the way my sculpture turned out even though I had originally planned on making a giraffe. I think I did really well with the shape and the balance of the panda. I also really like the designs that I chose to scratch on the back of the panda. Again, I am also really happy that I chose to make little nubs as the panda bears paws and then scratch on the design on the paws. However, one thing that was difficult for me while in the process of making the clay panda bear was when I had to make a hole in the bottom of the panda bear. I pushed the tool to hard and one of the arms fell off but it was an easy fix and I just glued it back on once the panda had came out of the kiln from being glazed. I am still very pleased with the way that my sgraffito animal came out and I wouldn't mind doing it again because clay is a fun material to work with.