Vader Helmet

The Darth Vader flower pot continues to develop:

No Face Reject

This was one of my practice faces for the No Face piece. With the addition of dental floss, I'm currently using it as jewelery.

Vader Face

This godless winter holiday season is going to be an adventure in all clay gift giving. My sister requested something incorporating Greedo, Moe Szyslak, or the endangered California tiger salamander. Then she changed her mind and requested a Darth Vader flower pot. Darth Vader is not the sort of Star Wars character I would usually incorporate into my work, but I hate to disappoint. I made this part tonight and I'm going to attempt the flower pot (including Vader's helmet) tomorrow.

Another Shroom Sold

Someone bought this shroom from my shelf at the pottery studio's gallery. It sold for $12, of which I get 70%. Christmas is apparently saved.

Yithian 2

This is my second attempt at a Yithian, the time-traveling, body-swapping alien race from H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow Out of Time." Unfortunately, slightly more than half of the tentacles around the mouth were broken some time between when I left it on the shelf and when it was removed from the bisque kiln. They could have dried out too much and fallen off due to the bisquing process or someone could have handled it less than gently (i.e. how one could safely handle an unbisqued clay bowl) and broken them off.




A digitally altered image with the broken mouthparts reattached:

End of Time

These are the fully glazed miniatures for my D&D character called End of Time. The name comes from the pyramid-headed South American shaman from Fierce Invalids Home from Warm Climates by Tom Robbins. The character is a deva shaman and his spirit companion is a parasitic conjoined twin. End of Time reincarnated with a twisted, hideously deformed version of himself attached to the back of his skull and knew that he must have committed some epic atrocities in his last incarnation.

Coffee Mug

My foray into the world of functional pottery continues: the Vicious Animal Mug.

The Rillito

I went for a walk through the Rillito, a riverbed that traverses the length of the north side of Tucson. It's dry except during the summer monsoon season.




I left a clay object with a pseudo-paranoid message on the base of an electrical tower.







A few other scenes from the Rillito:

No Face

This is No Face from Spirited Away. This piece also cracked in the kiln, but it's hard to see the scars in the photo.

Talz Column

This object cracked in the kiln, but I glued it back together. I had been planning to use the Queens glaze, which is a very light yellowish color with brown highlights. The glue would not have held in the glaze kiln so I painted it instead and some of the hair detail was lost.

I saw an action figure of Talz Jedi Foul Moudama from the Clone Wars TV cartoon and it looks much fluffier and rounder than what I'm producing. I don't think the Talz should be portrayed as mammals.




The day eyes are at least in the same plane as the night eyes in this figure, but I think they're still too small.

Spiky Pots

At my first clay class in 2004, after some brief instruction in hand-building techniques, the assignment was given to make a tea pot in the shape of an animal. I made a sea urchin, but it wouldn't have made a very good tea pot as it lacked a spout or handle. Part of it exploded in the kiln, but enough survived to glaze. I also made a second urchin pot a few months later.


First Urchin Pot




Second Urchin Pot



My mother requested a spiky pot and my first reaction was "But I made those when I didn't know anything about clay." I still don't know anything about clay, so I made my first real pot since 2004.






The lid:

4th Avenue Street Fair

This weekend was the Fourth Avenue Street Fair in Tucson. My offerings included some mushrooms, Grell Shroom 1, Beholder 6 (The Bad-Dental-Hygiene Beholder), several skull stars and USA-shaped surrealist objects.




Yesterday, someone bought this mushroom:





Today, a roving mob of married, middle-aged D&D geeks recognized this as a Beholder and bought it.

Ganesha Coins

Someone gave me some metal pendants with images of Ganesha and some Devangari script. The nice part about projects like this is that they're very unlikely to blow up or crack in the kiln.

More Kiln Disasters

Talz Column:
This piece was fired at too high a temperature and cracked. It's not the correct color due to the high temperature, but it's close to the color I was going to glaze it anyway. I'm going to attempt to glue the pieces together and possibly use brown acrylic paint on the face.



No Face:
I don't know why this one cracked. I assert that it wasn't my fault. I'm planning on gluing it together and painting it with acrylics.




Yithian 2:
This survived mostly intact, except for some tendrils around the mouth. This is the most difficult to fix because I don't have the tendrils and it's not complete without them.

Handsome Pete

Handsome Pete is a character from the seventh season Simpsons episode "Bart the Fink." In this episode, Bart inadvertently reveals Krusty the Klown's tax fraud crimes to the IRS. Krusty fakes his own death. Bart and Lisa figure out that he is now living as a diver salvaging scrap metal from shipwrecks. They speak to the Sea Captain down by the pier and Bart asks him to identify Krusty from an image on an underinflated balloon. Captain McCallister identifies the distorted image as Handsome Pete, a grotesquely distorted version of Krusty who plays the accordion and dances for nickles.

The clay object was constructed lying flat with the left foot heavily weighted, which I hoped would allow it to stand on that foot. It worked.

Eduardo

Eduardo is a character from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. The title explains the concept well: a group home for entities dreamed into existence by children but later discarded when the child outgrows the need for imaginary friends, or for a variety of other reasons. Eduardo looks like a mutant biker minotaur, but the character is timid and childlike.



My aim was to copy the character model as closely as possible. I left off the tail and the little hairs on top of the head because I thought they wouldn't survive the kiln (and the perilous stage of being handled by various volunteer before being placed in the kiln). I thought the pinkish color of Eduardo's face could be described as lavender, but apparently lavender is more of a bluish color.

Another Beholder

This is Beholder 8. I've been collecting scraps of clay for a few months and I have about 20 pounds or $36 worth of clay I was able to recycle. I wedged (kneaded) it for a long time, but I still found an occasional air pocket which means that Beholder 8 could contain unseen air pockets and explode in the kiln. Beholder 8 has about 80 teeth.

Cockroach Dude

Maybe that's supposed to be a cricket.

Hollow Deva

This started out as another version of my Deva Shaman character, but I wasn't in the mood to add any more detail than this. Also, I wanted to test out the Floating Blue as a skin color. I like it.




Original version of End of Time.