Clay

The goal of this assignment was to create a clay form in my case a whale shark(Billy), and create a design through sgraffito. My goal here was to use patterns of the habitat the creature lives in, meaning water, bubbles, sun, and night.

I used clay to create a hollow form then added coils for the tail and slabs for the end of the tail and fins. After painting with a blue underglaze (and in the case of the slab sgraffito black) I used sgraffito tools to scratch out my design. Then once the design was done and the glaze was dry it was fired and then glaze with clear overglaze and fired again.

This was a really great project but one issue I encountered was the underglaze drying too fast. When creating my designs, especially the waves it took a relatively big chunk of class so when the whale sat in the light room between classes it dried out too fast for me to be able to make intricate designs so the waves are not as big a part of the design as a I would have hoped. As a way to compensate for open spaces a made bigger desigs that were less likely to chip but still went with them for example the bubbles and the jellyfish.