sWhat a crazy year this has turned out to be! You have been some of my favorite students to work with and I have been, and I still am so excited to have 15 of your who have decided to complete portfolios this year. No one would have ever guessed that we would be facing a pandemic, a two week school closure, and now a distance learning situation. This makes your experience unique compared to any other student who has EVER taken AP pottery at our school. I want to make you a promise. If you are still committed to your portfolio, if you still want to to a portfolio in for scoring, if you are still willing to give your best effort. Then we will figure out a way to help you create a portfolio you are still proud of, and one that will still score well with the AP judges. I will do everything I can to help you succeed. I promise you that!
The reality is that we now have to change our mindset a bit. We have for years relied on the magic of the wheel to help our portfolios succeed. You will not have access to wheels most likely. This doesn't mean the magic is gone! There are so many amazing things that can be done with clay through hand-building and sculpting. And the truth is, your portfolio was never exclusively about wheel throwing, or even clay for that matter. The portfolio is called "3D-Design Studio Art," and anything, any material that makes 3D artworks counts. Clay yes, but also cardboard, paper, rocks, sticks, foam, metal, plastic, ANYTHING! So start exploring, researching, and planning!
I want to post a few videos that I think will be particularly helpful. These are hand-building videos that outline who to effectively construct traditional forms from hand-building techniques and will help you make pots. You can still build pots that will look similar to the ones you would have thrown on the wheel. Once they are built you can bring them to the school to be fired and glazed. I will still run all the usual firings that we do each year, so don't worry that your going to have to change your plans completely. Again, we just need to adapt some of our construction styles, but our overall designs can mostly remain the same! Please don't hesitate to contact me when you have questions!
The reality is that we now have to change our mindset a bit. We have for years relied on the magic of the wheel to help our portfolios succeed. You will not have access to wheels most likely. This doesn't mean the magic is gone! There are so many amazing things that can be done with clay through hand-building and sculpting. And the truth is, your portfolio was never exclusively about wheel throwing, or even clay for that matter. The portfolio is called "3D-Design Studio Art," and anything, any material that makes 3D artworks counts. Clay yes, but also cardboard, paper, rocks, sticks, foam, metal, plastic, ANYTHING! So start exploring, researching, and planning!
I want to post a few videos that I think will be particularly helpful. These are hand-building videos that outline who to effectively construct traditional forms from hand-building techniques and will help you make pots. You can still build pots that will look similar to the ones you would have thrown on the wheel. Once they are built you can bring them to the school to be fired and glazed. I will still run all the usual firings that we do each year, so don't worry that your going to have to change your plans completely. Again, we just need to adapt some of our construction styles, but our overall designs can mostly remain the same! Please don't hesitate to contact me when you have questions!
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.” -Chuck Close
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This is one of my all time favorite quotes. Write it in your sketchbook somewhere. What this means is that if your are waiting for an idea for a portfolio piece to pop into your brain while your sitting on snapchat or playing video games... you better get comfortable, because it isn't going to show up. We get inspired when we start doing work, which is exploring ideas, doing research, and making plans. YouTube is an amazing source of inspiration for hand-building ideas and techniques, use pinterest, instagram, and google image search. Find things that are interesting to you in clay BUT also in materials other than clay. Start to look at these things and ask yourself what could I design and make with these techniques? Im going to post a few videos here that I hope will get your started believing in hand-building. The first video is fantastic. I'll be adding never information here frequently!
HAND BUILDING WITH COIL
HAND BUILDING WITH SLABS
Remember to check out Mr. Frampton's Pinterest page, which has lots of boards with interesting ideas for a variety of artworks made out of clay. https://www.pinterest.com/mrframpton/