Hi guys and welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. My name is Tori Solis, and today I'm working on another dragon sculpture. This sculpture was actually for a class project for my college ceramics class. The theme was "inspired by nature". I like making dragons, so I thought I would look at some things from nature and take some of those elements to make this dragon.
For starters, the head of this dragon is going to be a lot like a Venus fly trap, but not exactly. It is going to have elongated teeth like a fly trap. Around it's head I wanted to put these leaves, kind of like a corpse plant that kind of encompass his head. I imagine that if he were a moving thing and not clay, that it would be able to open and close and this vicious head would be sticking out. The body itself is going to be based off of a vine, so it's going to be kind of long. Like most of my dragons, but I'm going to try to incorporate more vine-y, plant-like textures into this one. The spikes going down his back are going to be the shape of rose thorns. He is also going to have leaves on the end of his tail as the accents. I did decide not to give him any arms or legs, so technically, in the world of dragons and lore, he would be considered a wyrm, W-Y-R-M.
He is going to be pretty cool. I'm really excited to see how this one turns out. As far as all of my dragon sculptures go, currently I haven't decided how I want to be finishing them out. I did a couple where I finished them out by painting them with underglaze and then covering that with clear, and firing them that way. I'm really not liking how those are looking. Some people like them, but I don't. And it's my artwork so for me it's important that I like it. I think that when I do them with the underglaze and the clear they are coming out too shiny and too graphic, and that is not the look that I am personally trying to achieve in my work. I want somethings that's not so glossy, and not so.... loud is not the word, because I'm ok with bold and loud, but I want it to be smoother. I don't think I want anything really shinier than satin, unless it's used very carefully because the shiny for me just isn't it. I'm not really a big fan of shiny surfaces. So I'm not sure when I'm going to be finishing these out.
I am going to be starting a series of testing a lot of glazes that's going to be coming up soon on my channel. So go ahead and subscribe if you want to watch the glaze development and testing series that I'm going to be putting a lot of my work into. I'm hoping that once I figure out how some of these glazes that I'm going to make are working and what they are doing, that I can come back to my sculptures and color them how I want to with some of the glazes that I'm going to develop myself.
This clay body that I am working with right now is Laguna B-mix 5. I know a lot of people really like B-mix. I personally haven't really been a big fan of it. It's silky soft and smooth, but it comes with it's own set of issues, which, some people would argue are issues with the user. Basically, it's just a really dense clay body and if you don't have everything even, and it dries unevenly at all, it likes to crack. Which isn't great if you're working with sculptures where things are just going to be uneven anyway. I was lucky, spoiler alert, I did get this piece to dry and fire through the bisque without any cracking. Which is great because I've had some trouble with the B-mix. I don't think I'll be buying this again. I am going to be using B-mix in my test tile series, just because so many people use it, that, having it as a reference when I'm testing glazes is probably going to be helpful for everybody. I might change my mind some day. I might come around to B-mix. But I would say that my first impression with it is not super great, I'm not super fond of it. Silky smooth, but at what cost?
Personally, I like a clay body that can stand on it's own. Something with interest, something speckled or brown, or red, that has it's own kind of unique beauty to it. Those are more of the clays that I think I will be working with as far as my pottery goes. As far as sculpture, I have really enjoyed sculpting with white stoneware. It doesn't give me as many issue as long as you're able to work quickly.
This is the final project for my spring semester of college ceramics this year. I'm going to have a series review that's going to be coming out later. But it might be a little bit delayed because I have a lot of work that needs to go into the reduction kiln still. A family of geese decided to raise their whole entire goose family on the vent outside of the building of the reduction kiln. We all collectively agreed that we weren't going to fire that kiln until the geese moved out because we didn't want to kill a whole family of geese. So whenever that reduction gets fired, and I get my work back I will be doing a series review for all of this stuff.
This is the finished piece. His name is going to be "Dionaea", which is the genus name for carnivorous plants. If you like the way that he turned out, go ahead and give this video a thumbs up. If you'd like to see a weekly art video, you can subscribe to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. If you'd like early access to all of my videos, as well as access to exclusive content, you can find me at patreon.com/bluenosetrading. I will see you all, next week.
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