Daily Mini Sculpture Project: Cat Edition

Play Time Toys:

Here are a few more pieces from my daily project. For this challenge, I will make small sculptures on a regular basis, alternating assigned inspiration and open-ended projects.

This piece was from a hint that suggested I sculpt my favorite animal. I had just bought a book of sock animals so that my daughter and I can make some more stuffed animal friends. So this sculpture is a "cat" based on the baby cat in the book.

 

The next day was an open day, so I tried the cat inspired piece again. I think of cats sleeping curled up all around the house, so I started working on a ball of cat. Unfortunately I couldn't really remember what a curled up cat looked like (besides general round-ness), so I had to go check on our cat. She was not impressed.

Not Cats:

The next day I was ready to be done with cats. I had been thinking of sculptural vessels, and I guess I must have ran across an article about carnivorous plants (such as the pitcher plant). So when I pulled out an inspiration hint that said the name of a fellow ceramic artist, Carolyn Nelson, this is what I came up with.

Carolyn Nelson's work is influenced by architecture and ruins of brick and stone. She intermixes these inspirations with the human body. So I created the texture of this pitcher plant by pressing it onto cement and then pressing the end of a popsicle stick into it in a mini-brick pattern. I filled the pitcher plant with red clay bricks made by slamming a slab of wet red clay onto pebbled cement in our yard.

While I was working on the pitcher plant, my daughter played in her sandbox for the first time. though her sandbox has a crank-down top, apparently tulips don't need as much light as we though. This guy was sneaking up through her sand. Though it took more than a day with several interruptions, I finished this tulip-inspired piece yesterday.

Yesterday's inspiration hint simply said "book." I can't remember if I was supposed to make something from a book or if I had planned to change it to something inspired by a book I was reading. I decided to change it to what I was reading. Since I've been reading about art instruction, I decided to base it on something I'm listening to in the studio. Anyone who knows me well knows that odds are I'm listening to Harry Potter. So I made a snitch.

Ironically, I am listening to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the one Harry Potter book in which Harry doesn't play any quidditch or handle a snitch. 

After I had started the snitch project, I came across this picture in National Geographic magazine. I think this would make an interesting snitch.