Sgraffito 

I've always found the tree of life very interesting. And not just that exact representation of a tree, but trees in general. I know that trees are si important to the world in so many different ways and matter to us all. My dad is also a forester so I think I am even a bit more connected in that way as well. I really love seeing those old trees, the ones with the gnarly branches and roots that jut from the ground do that was my main point of inspiration. I just think that it's so cool to look at those trees and know that they have been alive for hundreds of years, that one tree may have seen the world during the middle ages, and seen the world through the world wars, the civil rights movement all these things. 

For this piece I began with just a block of clay so I used the tool with the wire and the two handles to cut myself a good sized ball of clay. Then I rolled it out using just a normal old rolling pin. Then to make it into a perfect circle, I layed a round, plastic, paint pallet on top of the slab and used a pallet knife to trace the perfect circle.  Then I rounded the edges a bit using my fingers and began to paint. I painted on the black underglaze with a fan brush and used a heat gun in between the layers to speed up the process. Once that was dry I began to use different clay tools to carve out my design. 

I started out with the idea of a tree on the side and then it would extend to about the middle then I would have a fairy-like figure, dancing beneath it. Then I decided that that would be difficult and would take up too much space so I decided to scratch the fairy idea and just go with the tree. I tried to keep the tree coming from the side of the circle at first, but I didn't look good so I decided to make it be the center.  As you can see in my idea generation drawing, I was originally planning to keep the background black and make the tree white, but once I have outlined the tree I thought it would look cooler the other way so I continued to carve it leaving the tree black. I did have a couple issues with carving the wrong this but nothing too drastic so it didn't really bother me. I decided to leave some of the streaks to give it more of a textured background which I think came out very well.