Colored Clay Sculpture

Mythical Turtle

The story behind this project is that it was originally supposed to be a surfaced clay sculpture, but due to the pandemic and not being able to go to school in person, we now had to paint or color or stain the sculpture. I decided to color it with markers because that was what I had. I chose to make a turtle for this project because I thought that the shell would give be an intriguing canvas to make designs on. And I just think turtles are super cool and strange looking.

For this project the materials I used to create this piece was white clay, a clay scraping tool, and fine point Sharpie markers.

I made this project by first making the body like a bowl with a rim for the top shell and spaces for the tail, legs, and head, and scraping out the outline of the bottom shell on the sides. Then I made and attached the top shell, and lastly the head, legs, and tail. For the designs on the outside, I decided I wanted black to be the main color, and for various shapes to be the design. Then I chose three other colors to fill in the space. And then I colored the eyes turquoise. My project evolved because originally I was just going to make it black and white, but I decided to add color. If I were to do anything differently, I would have used sandpaper or something similar to smooth the surface out.