Ocean #2

The idea behind this was to make little cocktail glass indicators like you would have at a party to make sure you knew which glass was your own. Since I had made a shrimp as my last project, I wanted to continue on that theme while connecting it to culture as a larger aspect. Shrimp cocktails are a popular drink at many fancy restaurants and so I wanted to make almost a play on that by making these as the indicators that would go around the bottom of your glass rather than on the rim. 

I originally wanted to use glass because I thought that that would give the shiniest and most sophisticated look that I was going for, but I soon realized that would be really difficult and I didn't have many of the materials I would have needed to make that happen. I decided on clay, because I have used it many times before and I would be able to manipulate it well even when it's small. I also knew that most glazes if they weren't a matte finish turned to glass in the kiln, so with a thick layer, it had the same shiny look. For the more orange highlight color I used glaze HF 167, and for the darker red shadows I used glaze HF 165.

I started by sketching out my ideas and all of them were really different, but I decided on this one because it really connected to the shrimp theme I had sort of started with my last project. I started with a fairly big hunk of clay and took off little pieces, as I started making the first one, I realized it was much too big. I ended up using so much less clay than I thought I would. I used the long sharp clay took to make the indents, and used my first shrimp sculpture for referance as to where the indents and creases should go. I poked holes for the wire to go through the eyes in the first two, but by the time I got to the second two, they were too hardened to poke a hole through without breaking, so I just left it and I plan to drill a whole through it soon for display. I then glazed them, I originally intended to use different colors of glaze on each one, but I really liked the red and orange combination so I decided to just stick with that (I also forgot). I then had to wait a while for them to be glaze fired, and I wasn't able to glaze the bottoms because it would stick to the kiln which was a little bit of a bummer, but i think it would sit flat anyway so it shouldn't matter too much.