Slab Houses

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How can you create a multi-sided, slab-built, roofed house that expresses your personality and interests?

The theme that I aimed for to show my hobbies/interest was to base my house on was travel, adventure, and nature. I feel like I tied this all together by incorporating a plane on one of my surfaces along with a mountain range with a sunset. For the sides without a nature looking texture, I made the glaze more of a brownish look, to make it seem like trees/forest. I feel like the different textures I used and different glazing techniques make the viewer want to look around my whole house. I feel like if I made the transition from wall to wall a little more seamless it would’ve worked more effectively, or made it a little more pleasing to the eye. Overall, I feel like the total outcome of my house was okay, it could have been less messy, but I was really happy with the sunset look.

To ensure that my house would stay together I made sure that I roughed up the edges that were being put together by using a serrated tool and adding a little bit of water with a paintbrush to make it act as if it was velcro. Add for extra support I added a coil where the seams of the slabs were and used a rubber tip tool to ensure that those didn’t become lose and actually provided stability for the house. When I was adding my texture and details I made sure that the clay wasn’t wet and that it was leather-hard so that I wouldn’t puncture through the clay by applying too much pressure with whatever carving tool I was using. If I were to approach this assignment again I would definitely have a more thought out plan at the beginning and make sure that it stuck throughout the whole process. I also would have practiced different designs/texture of spare pieces of clay before putting it on my house.