April 6th, 2022

4/6/2022

Clay Armatures

On Tuesday, small groups learned new techniques for their clay work. KW learned to work with armatures. Sometimes, clay sculptures can be too dense, which means the clay is too thick. When that happens and that clay is fired in the kiln, it can break or even explode. Armatures are a way for us to make hollow pieces.

Bea: "This is practice for the Clay Guardians."

Remy rolls out the clay and experiments with making a hollow sculpture on the cylinder first and later on a bowl.

Lily: Bea, how did you make that shape?
Bea: (pointing to her work) there’s a bowl under here (Assessing her work) It looks like a turtle shell
Bea adds markings to make it more like a turtle

Jade: (testing different techniques) So you cover (the bowl) and put the clay on to make the shape

Jade: I made a moon. I used (different tools. She points to each tool she used) and I used my fingernails (to make the craters)

A Head of the Human Guardian

Upon inspection of our Human Guardian, we noticed it was missing a center piece, its head. How can it protect if it can't see or ear anything? We decided to use the natural materials and sewing that we utilized on the body to create a matching head. But the head needed to have specific dimensions. We agreed that it needed to be round or circle and not too big.

Everyone is very excited with how fluffy the head will be. Especially Luke

We used sheer tights and fluff to create the a head for the Human Guardian.

Luke: It needs to be more circly.
Remy: Oh my god! It's so fluffy
Luke: We are putting more more more!
Cate: Then it becomes a circle. We have to add a lot of fluff.

At a certain point, we got a little overzealous...

Lily: Maybe that is too much fluff.
Cate: (Looking at her guardian head) Yea. Too much fluff.

Once the heads were stuffed to satisfaction, we had a new decision to make. Do we want to choose one head for the guardian or work on the two we have and decide later which one we will use? Ultimately, we decided to continue working on both heads in two groups of two. Our small groups looked over the beads, flowers and other natural materials to find the best items to create the face and hair of our guardian.

Remy: Leaves can be bows in her hair
Lily: The flowers can be eyes. Do we want orange or pink eyes?
Remy: All white.
Lily: How about you sew one eye and i'll sew the other.
Remy: Ok. This eye will be crazy
Lily: I don't want to sew that way because I don't know how

Taking turns was difficult because we were so excited to add materials and new ideas

Bea goes through materials to find hair

Jade and Bea are invited to join and immediately find materials to add onto the work.

Jade: It needs a mouth and a nose and hair.
Bea: These could be braids. I think it's really interesting hair. She needs to have braids.

Jordan: Bea, take a look a Jade's eyes. What colors do you see?
Bea: Blue! And white and black.
Jordan. Right. The black part is called the pupil. Do you think we could make that?
Bea and Jade: Yea. (they go to the container of buttons) These could work

Our two heads so far (work in progress)

The Message Guardian's Tiles

A few weeks ago, the message guardian group made clay tiles featuring children’s symbols. They have been fired, so it was time to decided on next steps. We discussed in our small group how best to proceed. Adding color was a rather delicate process. It involved painting the underglaze on, and then wiping most of it off.

Jade - Should we glue them on today?
Jill - Let’s look at them. Right now they are all white.
Jade - We can put some color on them.

Cate - If we just paint on it, you won’t see the symbol.
The children followed this process carefully to dozens of clay tiles. As they worked, they recognized the symbols they saw.

Lucas - Here’s my symbol. Jade gave it to me.
Cate - And Lucas gave me mine.
Jade - We don’t have Finlay’s symbol. We made one for him, but I don’t see it.
Wilder - Here’s Finlay’s symbol.

Springtime Flowers

The seasons are changing and it looks like we finally getting into spring. Jordan collects flowers that served as both table decorations and inspiration for our work. We studied the different parts of each flower before we made our initial drawings.

KW friends think about the colors, size and parts of the flowers before drawing.

Cate

Lily

Remy

Lily

Bea

On Wednesday, we returned to our beautiful flowers with new, brighter materials and paints that captured the vibrant color of the flowers. Of course, not everyone wanted to create flowers. Some friends were inspired to draw monsters instead.

Lucas - This is a robot guardian. The watercolors are the skin and the black is the mouth.
Wilder - This monster has fangs sticking out from all the eyeballs.
Jade - It’s a one-eyed monster with buttons. (The buttons are eventually covered by the black paint.)
Cape - This is a monster called Grumbly-Man.
Jade - This monsters loves colors.
Cape - This monster will grow up and eat a trash can.
Jade - My monster is so big…he’s from outer space to the center of the earth.