Scraffito Clay Animal

For this project, we were assigned to choose an animal, make it out of clay, and scratch a design onto it. I chose to do a piglet because I think they're cool animals and I like their ears. I started this project by making the piglet's body out of clay. I began with the torso, using the pinch-pot method to make the inside of the torso hollow. At first I wanted to make the piglet standing, but after making the torso I realized that it was going to be too heavy to stand on its tiny legs. That is when I decided that I would make the piglet sitting down. To slightly change the shape of the torso, I squished the bottom a little bit. I eventually closed the top of the torso and began making the head. I did this the same way, by making a pinch pot. I didn't close the pinch pot for the head because I knew that the whole thing would have to be hollow, so I cut a hole at the top of the torso and attacked the head. Next, I used a coil to make the neck by wrapping around where the torso and the head met. I smoothed all of this out then began to make the ears. I did the ears before the legs because I wasn't sure how I wanted the piglet to be sitting yet. I make the ears from slabs of clay and but and shaped them the way I wanted them to be. I made this feature a little bit too big for its body but I like how not everything is proportional. Once I was done attaching the ears, I moved onto the legs and feet. I made the legs from slabs that I rolled and made sure they stayed hollow. I made the two front legs first, which were longer than the back legs. Once I was done attaching all four legs, I realized that I made the ends of the legs look like feet already, so I just added some details to them. Once I was done that, I smoothed everything out and made some adjustments so that the legs were even to each other. Once I was finished with this step, I moved onto the final step of the building process; the eyes. To make the eyes, I hollowed out small pockets where I wanted the eyes to be. I then rolled small balls of clay and stuck them in the pockets. To finish the eye, I rolled two tiny coils and wrapped them around each eye to make it look like eyelids. When I was finally done with the entire structure, I used my fingers and water to smooth out and rough edges. After this, I let my structure sit out long enough for it to dry. When it was done drying, I used a smoothing tool to smooth out any parts of the piglet that I didn't get at first. Next, I painted 3 coats of underglaze on the piglet so that I could scratch a design into it. I decided to do a tree with a bunch of leaves on it and falling off of it because I wanted nature to be incorporated into it in some way. I started by using pencil to sketch out my design, then I used a needle tool to start carving the design out. As I was scratching out the leaves a few of them cracked and broke, which is probably because I put too thick of a layer of glaze. Also, two of the legs fell off while I was scratching, but I just kept going and scratched into the broken legs as well. When I was done scratching the tree, I scratched out some parts of the ears and around the eyes to make the ratio of black to white more even. There was also a small patch where some underglaze chipped off on the stomach which I wanted to cover up with some sort of design, so I scratched out a sun. When I was finished scratching, it was fired and I was ready for my next step, clear glazing. When it came out of the kiln nothing else had broken off or blown up which I was happy about. I grabbed the clear glaze and started painting. The clear glaze was pink, so it looked like I was covering my design in pink but it would dry clear in the kiln. I did a total of 3 coats, also making sure to glaze the 2 legs that had broken off. Once I was done this final step, I put it into the kiln and waited for it to be fired. When it came out of the kiln, I used gorilla glue to glue the broken legs back on. When I was finished, I was very proud of how it came out and I think it is my strongest piece so far this semester. I like how detailed it is and I think I did a good job with the clay. Clay is one of my favorite materials to work with, so I think this is going to be one of my strongest projects in 3D. If I were to change or add anything, I would try to cover the cracks where I glued the legs back on or try to include that in the scratched design.