Clay
I recently discovered clay as a medium, and surprisingly it was the hardest thing i've ever toyed with.
This piece was inspired by fungal plate growth, I wanted to recreate the shapes in a controlled enviornment.
Here are two pieces that I coated with a metalic glaze, the colors came out amazingly vivid. This photo cannot do it justice.
Shoe
This next piece is Trompe-l'œil (to fool the eye). It was inspired by a pair of shoes that I had when I first started art school. By the end of my final semester they had become pretty beat up. I decided that they sumed up my college art expierence, so I recreated one of them in clay. I first sculpted it out of clay, using the real shoe as a reference. I didn't want to get every detail into the shoe, I really just wanted to capture the essence of them.
After I sculpted the shoe I then put it into the kiln to become greenware. At this point I layered on my first coat of glaze. I chose white as my first layer so that I could layer on the grime, yet still have a bright undercoat to show wear and tear. This concept is called distressing and is commonly used to give new items an old or used feel.
The final process was painting on the wear and tear. Overall this piece took my about 20 hours to complete not including time in the kilns.
The final product weighs about two pounds and is very fragile. It conveys a slightly cartoony feel and gives the viewer the impression that this is a very old and worn shoe.
