Longboard-making

The entire year, I've been looking forward to this project because longboarding is my favorite hobby and I'm fascinated by how they work. It began with a stencil. Thomas and I sketched half of a board on a piece of cardboard, and spent a couple days improving the design and making revisions. After that, we cut out a couple of shapes. Obviously these shapes were a little rough, so we made the proper measurements to correct this. After that, we spent hours of our free periods wielding Dremels and sandpaper, smoothing the corners. After the smoothing, I created a custom board press out of wood scraps in order to bend my board, making it more shapely and flexible, in addition to creating a better tail. After a night in the board press, I decided that my board was ready for a sealant (in this case, I used shellac.) Next, I will apply another layer of shellac as a stain and sealant, and I will conclude the day by finishing the board with a polyurethane waterproofing spray. Between the shellac and the polyurethane, I may add some sort of design under the board. After the polyurethane is thoroughly applied, I will drill holes for the trucks, and attach the riser pads, trucks, bearings and wheels. After THAT, I'll put grip tape on top of the board, and it will finally be ready to ride.

CLAYPLASTERCLAYPLASTER

My work definitely incorporated the three aspects of the clay assignments. The leaf imprints turned out decent. I experimented for a while with different techniques for getting the imprint in, and questioned what I wanted it to look like. The overall product was a strip of clay layered with leaf prints, that I guess I was happy with. My animal was a wolf. I began with a pig, but as I sculpted, it began to look more and more like a wolf. I decided to roll with it. A challenge for that was that the clay was still wet, and the wolf couldn't stand. I countered this adversity by placing a rock in front of the wolf, as if it were putting its front legs up and howling at the moon. My last clay project was the most challenging. The bowl, which Mr. Ingenthron commented on as "looking like an ashtray," took me roughly two days. I began trying to make a large bowl on the pottery wheel, but pieces kept coming off with each mistake I made. I realized that the technique I was using on the wheel was not successful, so I sought advice. Learning a new technique from Mr. I, I was able to make a smooth, small bowl. The next step, decoration, was slightly easier. I imprinted a few pottery tools into designs on the bowl, including a checkerboard pattern at the bottom of the bowl that I think turned out very well.
As far as new clay project ideas go, I like the ones we are working with, but I'm certainly not opposed to thinking up new solutions for what to make out of plaster. I like the idea of chiseled plaster sculptures, like Sydney suggested. From blocks of plaster, we could make whatever we wanted. Right now, I think it would be cool to shape the plaster into a sphere with the rasp, then add cool designs. We could also make small plaster trinkets. I think that a sword or a thimble would be really cool and challenging.

paper

Making paper was a fairly simple process, but got a little complicated. My first sheet came out well, but was a little thick, so i trimmed it and rolled it out with a rolling pin. The next sheet of paper I was supposed to make didn't go nearly as well. The person before me broke the blender for pulping the paper, so I wasn't able to start until the very end of class. By the time I had my pulp, class was just about over, so I rushed through and got an awful piece of paper the next day. I decided that rather than making three pieces of paper, I was going to create something out of the paper that I had already made. THe result was the picture you see above, and I believe that it turned out pretty well.

PLASTER PALS!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?

Basically, Plaster Pals are the safest, easiest, and most crowd-pleasing plaster creation that we can make. Plaster hands would be just as "unuseful" (it's art, it doesn't have to be useful!) and since it's more time consuming and unfamiliar, we could come out with a less-than-favorable product to present. With Plaster Pals, we could make as many as we wanted until the ones which were perfect were ready to be presented. Also, plaster casts and masks are dangerous to make (i.e. plaster casts, if too tight, can store fat globules, which when released, can travel to the heart and stop it; plaster masks can BURN YOUR FACE OFF...) Considering our inexperience with plaster, it's best that we stick to something easy that we can really perfect.

Sketch + Sculpture

My sketch looks pretty similar to my sculpture. The lines in both are very precise. A main difference is that my sculpture has color, whereas my sketch is in black and white. Also, the sculpture is actually a better representation of the actual sculpture, as it gives depth which a sketch cannot. The sketch is also much thinner.

In addition, there are a few small details with which I took artistic liberties. Slices in the cardboard make for non-sharp angles, a feature which, in my opinion, adds character to the sculpture. The skis are more separated in the sculpture, as it is a replica of the original. I also left out a plaque as the bottom, which is too small to read. Overall, I think that the sketch was not necessarily helpful in my creation of the sculpture, as I looked at it, maybe, once before making it.

Independent Project

Symbolic Portrait

Symbolic portrait of John Coltrane