Seated Tardigrade on Monster Sofa

The tardigrades (water bears, moss piglets) are known for their unique ability to survive in a vacuum.  They are not well known for their ability to assume a seated posture and I think the awkwardness of a tardigrade attempting to sit on a couch is captured well in this piece.

Eris: Rude But Mirthful WIP

Finished version of Eris Idol #1

In addition to my Cthulhu idols, which I hope to have placed in every home in Arizona by 2017, I wanted to make some religious statues of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos.  Unfortunately, that means attempting to sculpt something that actually looks human and I was out sick with rickets for that month in art school.  

Here is my first attempt (image 1).  It's based on this simple and horrific plastic angel girl which was probably intended as a Christmas tree ornament (image 2).  I tried to combine it with this image of Eris from D'aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, my favorite book on the subject from my childhood (image 3).  I'm also including an image of the Statue of Liberty (image 4) to differentiate between Eris' hairstyle and the Statue of Liberty's.

I once had a dream about Eris:

04/28/04

98╣   Eris:  Rude But Mirthful

Floating/flying down a river.  I stopped to pick up A.F., who was in an apartment with her friends eating bad noodles and had them all over her face.  We went to a party.  Eris was there.  She was very short, with hair dyed bluish-black and a cruel smirk on her face.  There was a loud band playing, made up of goth kids and school board members pretending to French kiss each other.  Eris is rude but mirthful.

Cat Head 4 WIP

I continued with my new series of cat heads.  The commission was for an aberrant cat head that can be hung up.  You can't tell from the photo, but this cat head can be hung up.

Screwbean Mesquite Menorah

They may look like maggots, but the decorations on this menorah are molded from the seedpods of the screwbean mesquite tree, Prosopis pubescens. 

 

Screwbean Mesquite:

Chamsas 118, 119, and 120

Chamsa 118 has a few spots that didn't get glazed and I think I'm going to fill in the gaps and refire it.

Chamsa 119.  I used a combination of glazes, hoping for a golden color, but it looks more like mustard and the glaze on the pupil of the eye also ran.  Crappy discount chamsa.

Chamsa 120:

Cat Head WIPs

One of the other participants in the mold-making workshop had previously bought one of my pieces, the Pineapple Upside Down Chair Monster Object.  She commissioned a cat head ornament similar to the one I was using in the mold.  I'm taking a break from glazing to experiment with some cat heads.

That really doesn't look much like a cat, although the source image was some freakish hairless cat.  I guess this is fine as the person who commissioned it said she was fine with an aberrant cat interpretation instead of a faithfully sculpted cat image.

Mold-Making Workshop

I took a workshop on mold making and used a Cat Head object from 2012.

Filling in negative spaces and surrounding the object with clay:

The clay at the bottom is a drain for when the mold is used with clay slip (liquid clay).  The four round lumps of clay are "keys," where the top part of the mold will fit into the bottom.

Everything is wiped down with soap to keep it from sticking to the plaster.

The pottery plaster is poured on top.

After it dries, it is turned over.

Here I am preparing to make the other side of the mold.

I think I used the wrong type of soap or not enough of it because the plaster stuck to the bottom part of the mold and it was only with a great deal of pounding and cursing that I was able to extract and rescue the Cat Head.  The molds were destroyed in the process.

Small Cannabis Leaves

These were left over from the Cannabis Cup.  I'm planning on making a mold of one and mass producing it.

Chamsa 117

Homunculus

There's a parade in Tucson called All Souls Procession.  It's based on Mexican Day of the Dead traditions, with a lot of people walking around after dark with skull make-up on their faces.  It was so crowded last year that I left before the parade started.  Every time I would find a place where I wasn't packed into a crowd, people would start filling in in front of me and I would keep moving back until I wouldn't have been able to see the parade anyway.

I was thinking that it would be more enjoyable to be in the parade and I decided to work on making a grotesque clay baby that could be pushed in a carriage.  That may or may not happen, but this is the first attempt at a baby.  It has holes in the head and the body and I was planning on putting LED lights on the inside so it would radiate eerie light.

A homunculus is an constructed human effigy brought to life artificially.  Homunculus also refers to the miniature human beings that were once believed to live inside human sex cells in a long obsolete theory of human conception.

Cannabis Cup

This is a hand-built coffee cup decorated with four Cannabis leaves on the outside and one on the bottom of the cup.

Chamsas 114, 115, and 116

Chamsa #114

Chamsa #115

Chamsa #116

Bird Demon With Its Organs on the Outside

I have a series of very crudely drawn graphic novels I made when I was about twelve and I'm in the process of transcribing them.  This unpleasant creature doesn't actually appear in them, but he figures into the story in a tangential way.

The background and the eye are glazed and the rest is painted with acrylics.

Without a glare:

With a glare.  Shiny:

After the glaze firing but before the acrylics were painted on:

Unholy Valentine's Day Lamb

Back in February, I saw a collection of creepy old Valentine's Day cards.  Number 10 caught my eye.  The caption is "I now have a new unholy creature to haunt my dreams."  This is my interpretation:

Here is the source image:

Eye Cup #15

This is #15 in a series of slab cups with patterns of eyes and mouths.  This one is a reconstruction of a cup that was damaged in the kiln.