Eccentric Teapot

Artist Statement: For this assignment, I had to create a teapot that was like a sculpture, but had all of the basic features of a teapot. I decided to my my eccentric teapot of a cow because I thought I could smoothly incorporate the different features of a cow into the features of a teapot. I also have always loved cows so I was inspired to make a cow sculpture.

The first step of this project was to create a slideshow that specifically mapped out the design of my teapot. After creating several sketches I finally produced the final design of my teapot and immediately got to work. I began by creating two pinch pots and connecting them together for the body of the cow. As I worked, I made sure to let my different pieces dry just a little before connecting them so they wouldn't become sloppy. After the body, I added the utters, the hooves, and the tail.  I decided that the utters would act as the feet of the teapot because I thought it was kind of funny. Next, I worked on creating the head of the cow. I thought this would be the most challenging part of this project but I actually had a lot of luck when creating the shape of the head. I smoothed the head out a little and connected it to the body after letting it dry a little bit and poked a little hole in the mouth for the spout.  The next step of my project was creating the lid and smoothing everything out. For my lid, I was originally going to create a boring old plaine one but I decided to add milk bottles on the top to make it more interesting. After it was complete, I let it dry and the tail ended up slightly cracking so I had to add a little bit of glue to it in order to keep it place. After it was fired, I glazed it with many different colors of glaze adding characteristics of a real cow.

I am very happy with how my final product turned out because I think it actually looks like a cow. This has probably been one of my favorite projects that I have ever done in ceramics because there were so many different parts of the cow that I had to create and I am really happy with how it turned out. On top of this, I really enjoyed seeing how everyone else's teapots turned out.