Bad Week In Clay

I have been working on an abstract sculpted nude for the past three weeks. It was looking good and I was only about five minutes away from sanding the last imperfection out of it. I get the Dumb Butt award for accidently knocking it over. In its leather hard stage the head broke off and the body was broken at the knees. Arrrg! Both were clean breaks. I actually tried to mend the lower half by slipping and scoring, but I'm not sure if the surgery will be a success. The head broke right at the neck and actually looks pretty good with no head and the clean break. I'll check it out tomorrow and see if it can be salvaged. If not I'll start it all over again.

Just getting back to Linda's comment about my nude torso--I started making the piece by rolling out a coil of clay that was slightly larger than the size of the torso I wanted to sculpt. I let that dry to a point where it was inflexible but still soft enough to use some carving/trimming tools to start sculpting out the form. It is a solid piece of clay but I did use a 3/4 inch drill bit to hollow out some from the bottom of the base. I drilled upward into the middle of the form approximately 3 inches. I did this because I was going to display it utilizing the dowel and a small marble base.

For those of you following my raku posts, I received a good article about Diana Pittis' raku fish sculptures. She describes her methods and also gives out a couple of the raku glazes she uses. The link is below.

http://www.ceramicartsdaily.org/feature/featuredetail/2008-10/gonefishingparttwo.aspx

Better get going.