Artist inspired project

In this project, my Ceramics One class and I were required to create a ceramic piece inspired by an artist that may have caught our attention, or whos work was specifically intriguing. I decided to choose the artist Wade Tullier. Wade Tulliers pieces are very simple and elegant. They often are composed of no more than two colors, and often seem like mystical creatures. My piece was inspired my Wade Tullier's piece "Figure." I typed to mimic Tullier's piece by smoothing exessivly and not adding too many parts and pieces to my design in an atempt to keep it simple. I first started with the lower body of my creature. To make this part of my creature, I started with a sizable chunk of white clay. From there, I molded the chuck of clay into a large solid sphere. I then began using a pinch technique to extend the sides of the clay outwards and upwards. Soon, the clay that was once a solid sphere was soon formed into a bowl-ish shape. I made two of these forms so that when attached would form a hollow oval-ish sphereical shape. Using the "scratch-scratch, water, attach" technique and with a lot a smoothing, the spheres imperfections dissipated into a believable hollow oval. I did the same technique for the head of the figure, only on a smaller scale. From there I added the features, and a scarf to make it more visually intersting.

The artistic principal that I relied the most heavily on for this project was clearly form. I wanted each part to be perfect, as it is such a small, basic design, so, I spent almost one full class period dedicated to smoothing and ironing out any small imperfection. With such a basic piece, with such simple forms, I learned that even small mistakes such as a slight tilt can stand out like a sore thumb. I struggled that most with creating something imspried, but not exatly the same as Wade Tullier's work. I noticed that Tullier uses the same quost like shape, as seen in the picture far below to the left, in many of his pieces, but I different ways. So, I did the same, I copied the weird quost-like figure, but added my own arrtistic touch to make it my own. Wade Tullier's pieces are often a but creepy and otherworldly, so I decided to make my piece cute and friendly. When I was almost done with construction, Caroline said to me that it looked like Totoro, which is funny because I was probably trying to create Totoro without even knwing it; a round, cute, snowman-like shape, with a surprised expression.