Concentration #2

At the beginning of the fourth quarter, we were told that everything we make this quarter would revolve around a certain concentration. We were assigned to think of something that related to us in some way and use that as the concentration of all of our projects in the final few months of school. When thinking about what my concentration could be, I thought of doing marine life, flowers, the sun, and a bunch of other random things. It took me a while to figure out what I actually wanted to do: stars. I chose for my concentration to be stars because I feel like it is a simple shape that could be used in a bunch of different, interesting ways. We made a storyboard for our concentrations and came up with six ideas of projects we could do. Some of my ideas involved ceramics and wire. I knew that I wanted one of my first projects in my concentration to use clay, which is why I decided to make a teapot. I began the teapot by making 2 large pinch pots. I stuck them together and cut a hole in the top of one to make the opening for the lid of the teapot. Next, I worked on the spout. To make the spout, I made a slab and rolled it to make it look like a pipe. I cut it the length I wanted the spout to be and cut a whole in the base of the teapot to put the spout on. I shifts the shape of the spout a little as I kept going with the project, but nothing too crazy. Next, I make the handle. This was the easiest part of this project, because all I had to do was make a coil, get it in the shape I wanted, and stick it to the base of the teapot. When I was done all of this, I made the lid. I made the mistake earlier of not saving the piece of clay that I cut out of the top of the pinch pot, which would've made it easier to get the lid to be the right size. I didn't do this, so I made a slab and cut a circle in it and kind of guessed how big the lid should be. Once I got it to the right size, I rolled a little ball of clay and stuck it onto the top of the lid. I knew that I wanted to incorporate stars by using the scraffito method, but I also wanted to incorporate them in another way. This is when I had the idea to cut a few stars out of clay and stick them onto the side of the pot. This was definitely the most challenging step of this project because I free-handed all the stars, so they came out looking a little wonky. After I was done with making the teapot, I decided to not do scraffito anymore and just paint it. After it was bisque fired, I used different shades of yellow paper from random magazines and glued them onto the stars. Next, I painted the rest of the teapot black to make the stars stand out even more. Overall, I am pretty proud of this project. I think my technique in making the teapot was successful and my color and design choices reflected my concentration well.