Solid Built Portraits & Snow Days

Sully from Monsters Inc, sculpture by Jaxx Brown. On critique day Jaxx's hand hurt from applying the fur texture the night before.

My Hand-building class recently finished their solid portraits. For the second year in a row, the flipped hand-building class solid built projects have been really successful. This year, the students had an extra challenge added to their project: snow days.

The snow has been beautiful, but also bizarrely disruptive (picture of snowflakes on my car).

During February Yakima Valley College had an unprecedented three class days, two weekend days, and one evening where the campus was canceled because of snow. We had something like 30 inches of snow and at least once we officially had blizzard conditions. Our typical average snowfall is only 2-3 inches for February. If anyone was wondering, this IS what climate change looks like: 

Isabella Johnson's dog was one of the sculptures in pieces on Wednesday. That, combined with the thin legs and complex fur (really the first is excellent!) made me very concerned about this piece.

Students in Hand-building only lost one actual day of class time, but they also lost two full work days, both at inconvenient times. The first snow day cancellation came on a Tuesday. The day before I had told the students they needed to have their solid built sculptures dried to leather-hard on the surface so that we could cut them apart during class on Wednesday. Usually this would be achieved by leaving the sculptures uncovered from Tuesday afternoon until class time on Wednesday morning.

Raquelline Llaguno redid the eyes and mouth each 3-5 times on this sculpture of her brother. Each time the eyes and mouth got better and better. I would love to see what she'd do with 3 more days. 

Since they couldn't come on campus on Tuesday, about half of the sculptures weren't ready on Wednesday. Luckily no students had left their work uncovered Monday afternoon with the plan to cover it again on Tuesday (because that would be too dry). Unfortunately some students were planning to work on their projects during the day Tuesday or the previous evening. A number of people left campus earlier than planned on Monday because of the snow.

Malea Esqueda took on a seriously challenging standing form. This could have broken or cracked in so many different ways just because of where the weight and balance are positioned.

On Wednesday, we had to adjust our plans. Some students were on track because they had taken care of drying on Monday. Others were a day behind. On Friday some students had their pieces hollowed out and put back together, but others had their sculptures in pieces. I instructed those students to keep the work tightly covered over the weekend with the plan that we'd have everything put back together on Monday. That weekend was the start of the blizzard, and campus was closed again on Monday and Tuesday. 

Samantha Reynolds didn't want to finish the face, but eventually pushed herself to do so. Her attachments of the thin slabbed sections was careful and patient.  

I was pretty worried on Tuesday that we'd show up on Wednesday to a room full of bone dry pieces too dry to put together. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when we came in Wednesday morning to find that everything was wet enough to put back together safely.

Samantha Sugihara chose an expressive position for this portrait of her daughter.  The thin arms and hands worried me, but not only did this not crack during drying, it was dried and is the first solid sculpture to come out of the bisque firing.

All the students ended up getting their sculptures put back together in time for the critique at the end of the week. All the pieces were in one piece* for the critique. Of course several pieces were not as "finished" as the students had intended. Some surfaces were a little rougher or simpler than originally planned, but with only 10 weeks of class time, we didn't really have any room to absorb three missed days. During critique, I often write some prompts up on the board for students to discuss. This time I asked "What would have done differently with 3 extra work days?"

*All the sculptures were in one piece except for this standing dog sculpture. The artist, Isabella Johnson, was working on the sculpture when I realized we'd better measure the length. With the tail attached, the dog would have been too long for our electric kilns. Isabella ended up keeping the tail separate and we have plans to attach it later with epoxy.

I was impressed with the amount of effort and patience the students exhibited for this project. Most of the students were disappointed that they had lost time, but they all seemed to adjust to the disruption fairly well. We had a few pieces with minor cracks, two in the base and a few on features, but so far I haven't seen any serious structural cracks. Last quarter, my Intro to Clay class had some real struggles with cracking, mostly because they didn't do any work outside of class time. A number of sculptures were riddled with structural cracks caused by trying to attach dry clay to wet clay or dry clay to dry clay.

Jennifer Martinez chose to create a portrait of a mask wearing character from a parade in Mexico. I've very unfortunately forgotten the name of this subject, so I'll have to ask her again on Monday.

This quarter's class is a delight. I often find that students who work hard have a ripple effect through the entire class. Students observe their classmates coming in after class, working hard, and being successful, and it influenced them to work hard as well. A bit of a competition gets started in the classroom and students also begin to share recommendations about techniques or ways to improve.

Ivy Shearer created a standing portrait of a muppet from The Dark Crystal, whose name I've also forgotten. Ivy's sculpture broke into more pieces than intended during the hollowing out process, but she patiently put it all back together a did some major repairs before critique,

Most of the sculptures for this class have not yet been fired so it is possible that some cracks will develop or we will discover that a piece was left too thick, risking explosions in the kiln due to hidden moisture. However, I was able to feel most of the pieces of most sculptures this quarter, so I am fairly confident that nothing very thick is hidden in any of the sculptures.