My opinion on the lack of one leg has truly grown on me in this past week! I was planning to attach it back with super glue when it had gone through the kiln, but i feel like it makes Ed (my monster on the mug) have more character and more monsterly so i’ve decided to not re-attach the leg and keep him the way he is. The glaze came out great with no bubbles or cracks and it’s completely water-tight and doesnt have any painting mishaps like spoltchy underglaze or lazy looking lines or bleeding. I’m very pleased with how this mug turned out and also love the size of it because I needed a new mug that was slightly bigger because I accidentally shattered the one i normally use at home! It was the perfect time to make this mug. The handle has also turned out great! It’s super strong and is most definitely not coming off which shows how much I’ve learned from my first attempt at the monster mug project where the handle dried and cracked and completely broke. Here’s some pictures of the final product! Photos-001 (1)

I forgot to add in the last post that I added little legs with clay to the bottom of my mug and during the weekend i thought of the idea to draw a little monster on the mug with his legs sticking out! And so this week i did exactly that. I painted an orange-ish red-ish colored little monster onto the side of my mug and painted the rest of it black to make him stand out as much as possible. i gave him big very captivating eyes and a cute little almost shy looking smile. But after he went into the kiln, i put him on the table to start overglazing him when all of a sudden him leg broke off! The other leg is still fully attached and doing just fine but for some reason i mustve badly attached one of them and it just couldnt hold on any longer. But the leg that fell off is still fully intact and i’m keeping it safe so i can put it into the kiln and just reattach it back on to the mug after its all been high fired. Here’s a picture of the leg waiting to go in the kiln with overglaze already on it.

So, sadly I was correct when I said that I was pretty sure that my mug handle would break. I left it for the weekend and when I came back on monday to check how it was doing, the handle had snapped in 2 and the bottom half had smushed itslef into the base of the mug which made it very ugly, unstable, and unfunctioning. So I tried to somehow save it because I really liked the size of the cup but it just wasn’t possible because it was already bone dry. So I lost motivation and did it for a while but then later regained the will to work on it, and started over. This time i made the handle much thicker and also made the mug itself much larger so it could hold more liquid because i had recently broken my biggest mug and needed one to replace it so why not make it myself! Next week I’m gonna paint it with a fun design that I havent decided on yet, but hopefully over the weekend I’ll think of something.

My tile came out and it isn’t how i thought it would look. I thought it would be clean bright white/cream-ish colores lines but something must’ve happened while it was in the kiln because the black underglaze seemed to bleed into those lines and make it much harder to see. I still do like the end product and it still means a lot to me but i’m very confused with how this has happened. I’m guessing that perhaps i used too much underglaze and so when the overglaze went on and cooked into the glass like coating, it was too much for the underglaze to stay in one place and it basically melted into the areas around it. EduBlog wont let me post pictures of my final product but i’ve attached it to the Teams assignment. The brightness of the lights caused the shine on the tile to be pretty extreme so you really can’t see the lines well but in person it looks much much better and i think I’m gonna take it home and use it as a paper weight!

The labels of this work are:

This week I got the tile done! I finished the outline of it and made sure each line was deep enough into the clay so that it would be easy to see after i put the overglaze on and it had been high fired.

It looked like this at that point, then i overglazed it all and it’s now waiting to be put in the kiln. I’m really happy with how it turned out and i’m really happy with my decision to put the tear drops/rain drops pattern in the background because I believe it adds a layer of depth to the whole thing!

I got so much done this past week! I made my tile, and I painted it, and i even started carving out the flowers in the underglaze! I’ve been using this small knife looking carving tool because i find it is easier to hold and control to make the small thin lines. A challenge i found with doing this though was that it can be hard to get the underglaze out of the lines because it’s much thinner and more delicate than if i used a different tool.

I chose black as the underglaze color (it looks grey but in reality it is black and will get darker when it goes in the kiln) because it’ll have the sharpest contrast i think with the clay’s color and make it seem more white than if i were to choose a dark blue or purple or something i think. So far I am feeling good about what I’ve made and I am hoping it will end up working out how i want it to!

I’ve drawn out my plan for what to do with my tile. Me and the girl at the end of my table row are gonna connect tiles, probably through some part of one of my flowers going over to her tile at the corner of mine. I plan on having the white tulips like I planned before, but instead of having them closed like you would normally see them, I’ve decided to draw them open, because then even though it’s the same flower it appears differently and people may think it’s something else, which represents the way that people saw the person that this piece is about vs how he truly was. It also shows growing and change which represents the healing and grief process i went through in this past year to accept what happened. I’m also going to add water droplets in the background which are meant to be tears coming down and even though they’re tears and it’s sad, the tears help grow the tulips so everything comes full circle and even the darkest of situations have a silver linning.

With this project i have a couple inspiration pictures that I found,

On the 24th it’s the anniversary of the death of a good friend of mine so I really want to think of him and almost honor him in some way through this project. So i googled the meaning of different flowers because on a grave, a lot of the time you’d see flowers left by loved ones of the victim. And i found out that white tulips are beautiful flowers with the meaning behind them being along the lines of innocence, condolences, honor, and grief, and I believe that fits perfectly with what I want to do.

Within a weeks time I’ve done a lot with my monster mug…

First, I made a mug but when i left it overnight it fell (I’m sharing a cubby with 2 other people and one of them accidentally knocked it over when they were taking out their stuff) and it smushed and almost cracked because I made the paper towels too moist when I left it overnight so It basically smushed all together. So I decided that since it’s still good clay and the current mug I had didn’t work anymore, I would make a new mug! So I did and it worked great, but it was the day before spring break and so I had to get it done ver quickly and wasnt able to get the handle on very well, and I feel like its much too thin to survive much longer. Hopefully a miracle will happen and when I come back from break the handle will be intact and well attached but I sadly dont have high hopes for it.

This week I painted my coil pot with the final layer! I thought it would be clear, so when i opened the jar and it was bright blue I was very confused but when I asked Mx. Vittie and they said that it would become clear after it was fired so I’m very interested in the science behind that. I tried to paint on a somewhat thin layer because I looked up some tips so I could have the best possible result and it told me that if it was too thick then air bubbles can be made and it can create lots of unwanted things, so I tried my best but on some parts it was hard to do, like the ring of small conected balls because of the shape of them and how I could find a paintbrush that could paint it on well. Here’s a pcture of it, on the tray, painted and ready to get fired for the last time!