Sunday, January 31, 2016

LET'S ROLL

SLAB FOOTED BOWLS
CERAMICS I
clay, glazes & oxides

We are seeing my beginning clay students first experience at rolling out the perfect slab.
Not so easy without a slab rolling machine like they have at the big schools in the sky,
just a plain old baking rolling pin.
It's hard to get them perfectly even.
The kids have a tendency to get one area too thick and the other too thin.
There is a trick,
 with pieces of wood on either side of the rolling pin that I haven't shown them yet,
 because I want to teach them to use their eyes to check slab thickness.
I don't like teaching my beginners to take the easy way out.
A bit of struggle is a good thing,
right?
Builds character  LOL
Like in the good old days!!

So I don't usually let my kids copy characters 
but this one was so well crafted by senior Tarun Desai,
that I didn't have the heart to tell him to start over.

This is more what I want the students to strive for,
there own designs like senior Casey Yoon & junior Gary Liu.

But it was junior Nathan Lam who really impressed me with his sculptural piece.
Note the subtle texture under the bowl area,
& the tiki men as feet?
Super cool piece Nathan!

3 comments:

  1. Nathan's is a wonder ... did he roll his slab on something to get the texture? And the glazed versus unglazed portions are nicely done, but it is the whimsy of the piece that makes it most appealing.

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    1. I'm pretty sure he got the texture from rolling on his wood board that's covered with a very textural towel. I also have really cool textural paddles that he could have used after he placed his slab over his newspaper mold. But I think it's his towel.

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