Okay, so I am officially really excited for this semester! I am a few weeks into my first potter's wheel class, and it is intense to say the least. Our first assignment was to make four tumblers or mugs- hello, custom coffee mugs! I am supposed to have said mugs ready for their first firing by Monday. I am happy to say that I have four mug shapes done, and all I have to do is smooth the bottoms off and make and attach their handles. It has not been an easy process, though! Centering the clay on the wheel took a few class periods to master, and that's only the first step. I'll spare you all the details though, and skip to the part where I was actually trying to form some viable mug shapes. My problem is that I'm impatient. Pulling the clay up to raise the sides is a slow, exact process, but of course I want it to happen right away and as a result I ended up with some crazy looking first attempts! I did get the hang of it though, and started making simple cylinders. The problem with cylinders, once you get over being excited that you can make them, is that they are incredibly boring. So I made a cylinder, and then decided, hey, I'm going to try something new and try to make this shape more interesting! With a few spins of the wheel, my cylinder collapsed into a sad heap of soaking wet clay. Oops! Right when I thought I was getting good, the wheel decided to take me right back down to my humble beginnings. This went on for a few tries though, because I figure that if worse comes to worse, I can make cylinder shapes and then use the glazes later on to add interest, but while I have the time, why not mess around and try to make some cool shaped mugs? I was eventually successful, (this is a loose term, of course, since none of them are perfect AND they haven't even been fired yet, so who knows if they'll stay together in the kiln) and I will post pictures of them once they have handles attached!
And now on to advanced figure drawing! I am loving it. The class meets from 6:00-9:30 pm two nights per week, which I really like. Even though by that time I'm tired, I'm happy to sip on coffee and simply be in the class, knowing that there is nothing else that needs to be accomplished that day. It helps me to focus! So far, we have been focusing on the hands, arms, and shoulders, doing small studies at home of the anatomy (muscles, bones, etc) while drawing the full figure in class. There's been a lot of homework so far, but it's work that I enjoy. Right now, I'm working on a drawing of lots of hands in various positions, and I'm working in the patterns from my previous blog posts. I can tell that the class will be interesting, because every day there is something totally different. For one assignment, we had to draw the model (a middle aged man) as a baby. It forced us to really consider proportion and think of how an infant looks from memory, without looking at one in person. I used a chiaroscuro style, mainly because my professor had the lights low with a dramatic one right on the model. Another day, I walked into class to find a huge ladder that would be used as a prop to help us practice perspective. Who knew drawing the ladder in every pose would be more difficult than drawing the model?! Other times, I've walked in to find a large tree, apples, an iron, a mannequin torso, you get the picture. Anyway, the class is great so far, and I already feel like I'm improving even more and getting a good handle on anatomy and how to accurately represent figures in space. On top of that, there is a lot of openness in our assignments, so I feel like I am free to try new things and inject more of my own style into my drawings. Photo updates will probably be frequent!