Recycled Piece:

This art piece taught me about the properties of plastic, liquid glue and other hard substances. My initial idea was a weapon of destruction but I ended up with a space transport/ weapon.

I started off with a Clorox bottle as my base, or the body which I would build out from. I had the vision of a massive ray gun with a tunnel from which a clear substance would flow through it, but from my classmates experiences keeping water in was an unsolvable problem. So I just cut up a water bottle in equal intervals then stuck C.D's onto them to give them this flashy look. Then I stuck the product onto the bottle then I stuck on this massive rippled hard plastic circle. I then cut up a c.d and stuck it on, then I added this red broken plastic pieces to represent an after burner. Then I stuck on a computer hardware application on the side, then finally I created an alien which was fired and inserted into the sculpture.   Finally, we went to the library and poised them on the stands.

Self Portrait:

My self portrait taught me many things about the properties of clay. My work showed me that one of the hardest sculptures is one of the head. The head in itself presented a new and exciting challenge, to duplicate a figment that represents emotion and life was immensely excruciating.

One of the hardest features was the facial shape or the skull and eyes.The eyes were hard because no matter how much you adjusted and readjusted them they would always look cross-eyed, or lifeless. The facial structure was challenging because you had to make the head look proportional and all the components had to "flow," otherwise the head looked blocky and cartoon. I also used a texture component using a pinch technique, I used bigger pinches for the hair because my hair is rough and curly and smaller pinches for other facial hair. I also made my head have a downward flow to it; I wouldn't smooth out the face, I would keep little pieces of uprooted clay on the sculpture so it would look natural but I wouldn't do it too much because I didn't want my face to look old or to weathered by the ages. When I had finally completed my sculpture I had to split it down the middle and to withdraw all the internal clay. Surprisingly, I had only found one air bubble right next to the eyes because I had been playing around a lot in that area. After I had finished the task, I scored and slipped it but the final result was that I had a huge fault line running down the middle I had to smooth it out.

Concluding, I fired the sculpture and after two class periods I had it back in front of me, and I was presented with only one problem that was my ear had fallen of; I resolved the problem by simply gluing it together with simple carpenter glue. My final step was to varnish the product with a spray, I tried to vary the distance and amount I would spray on the face depending on how I wanted the lighting to affect it. Then I just waited for it to dry and put it on display.