I am most proud of the mugs that I made for my soft slab project. I am most proud of these mugs because although they are very simple, I enjoy that look. I also feel like this is the project I mostly succeeded with. At the beginning of making mugs, I made a couple that I thought were good but I really noticed how much I improved when I looked that these mugs. This is because I learned how to smooth my mugs better and glaze them using the correct technique. I learned that it is very important to make sure your mugs are perfectly smooth when they are leather-hard because once they are bone dry it is very hard. to recover from dents or scratches in your mugs.
Now that I have taken this class, I think of ceramic makers in a much more positive way. Previously, when looking at clay sculptures or pottery I thought it was very basic and didn't take a lot of skill. Now that I have taken this class, I have much more respect for ceramic makers because it takes a lot more time than I imagined, and there can be so much that can go wrong. What I mean by this is your ceramic sculpture could explode in the kiln, you could use the wrong glaze , and many more things that you could mess up on so suddenly that you may not be able to fix. This makes me realize that there are so many things around me that have been made by ceramic artists like mugs, vases, plates, and just everything can be made from clay! I now appreciate all kinds of are much more and am suddenly noticing how many things around me took time and effort to make, not only from clay but every material.
This class ran very smoothly for me, and I can't think of many ways that it should be improved. To start off, I really enjoyed having a fun class period to work on projects. It was very helpful because it made me more aware of the time that I needed to take in order to make every project successful. This was a great class to be creative in and every project was so open to ideas, which I loved. If I were to s say something about making this class better, I would find it more helpful if we got more examples from other classes and previous artists that have taken this ceramics class to get ideas of what we are supposed to make. In the end, I enjoyed taking this class to be creative and allow my brain to get a break from other stressful school classes.