Week 8

Studying the Human Form

In Week 8, to help me adjust back into the workflow I decided to do studies and sketches to get back into the swing of things.

One person I had regular access to was my boyfriend (it’s complicated) through life drawing and photos. His features are so drastically different to mine that I thought it would be more beneficial for me to attempt to use him as my reference instead of myself.

For these next sketches I attended one of the life drawing classes at hunter Thompson with local.art.club. I’m really pleased with the A3 Ink drawings I completed considering this was my first time attending a live life drawing session. I wish I’d gone sooner and hope to attend more in the new semester. I can’t attend the uni ran courses as they’re not compatible with the AP course but considering how many independent classes run all over the city I’ll be sure to be attending at least fortnightly from now on.

Making Maquettes

I’ve come to the realisation that I’m not going to be able to get these glazed in time for submission seeing as there’s a 2/3 week wait on access to a kiln but If I can spend the time to increase my knowledge in developing forms then I can spend a good portion of time next semester experimenting with different outcomes. Building off of a mirror reflection of my face and my previous sketches of Lewis I created the two maquettes below as I definitely did not have time to make another bust!

Whilst making them, starting with the smaller one of my own face, I wasn’t spending too much time on proportions or scale and had initially only intended to do tile like sections of the face before changing my mind, hence why the side of the smaller study is incredibly flat and disfigured and the one of Lewis is significantly better constructed. I also considered how they would be presented so I actually constructed a panel on the back of the hollowed structures with spaces for screws so the can be wall mounted as shown here

These only took a couple hours so I’m clearly becoming more confident in my ability to handle the medium and by having multiple well rendered sketches to look at in advance made it so much quicker than my Delores piece. In the extra time I had allotted myself for clay work I decided to look at different ways to render eyes as multiple people said the eyes on my bust were interesting and really unusual for clay pieces as they were either used to a blank eye or a suggestion of an iris rather than the 3D approach I took. I decided just to have a bit of fun with this one below of a tile called “Eye = We” in reference to my manifesto which I’ll talk about next week but was in development as I was making these pieces.

I’m intrigued to make a series of handmade tiles like the one above and using that to construct a wall mounted portrait. As a series of tiles can be mounted, grouted etc. whereas this one here had to be mounted with angled pins which worked and had an interesting effect but definitely wasn’t clean enough to be a stand alone piece. I look forward to developing my clay skills more into contemporary finished pieces but in the meantime this week will remain as a study week as I develop my manifesto in the background

Reference List:

Peterson, S. (1999) The craft and art of clay. 3rd ed. London: Laurence King