Book Ends

For this assignment, we needed to make a book end of our choice with no guidelines for a topic. I chose to do the theme of Spongebob because my room is going to be cartoon themed and that show is a very recognizable one. At first I wanted to make a cube with the blown up faces of different Spongebob characters on it but Mr. A said that wasn't original enough. I also wanted to do a truck because I thought that would be cool to have half of the truck on one side of the books and the other half on the other side. I decided to then combine the 2 ideas as shown in the sketch and make a Spongebob themed truck.

To create this, I first made a model of the truck in the size that I wanted it out of cardstock paper so that it would be easier to assemble. I neglected to consider that the actual product had to be 3D so it had a lot more sides than I was expecting it to. This didn't take too long and after that had been assembled I rolled out slabs and just traced the pieces using the template I just made myself out of cardstock paper. This made the process a lot easier. I decided to wrap it and wait a couple days so that it would be firm enough to assemble without caving in but not yet leather hard. This made it easy to assemble when I started to because I had also labelled the pieces so I would know which one goes where.

For the actual glazing process I used mostly underglazes keeping in mind that they do get a lot darker than I expected when you put the clear glaze over it (as shown in the teapot assignment). This part took me the longest because I had to make the little sections of the pineapple using a ruler to try and make all of the sections roughly even. I am currently finished and will apply a clear glaze when it is bisque fired.