the materials we used were:
*wooden stand, this was a square piece of wood with a pole rising vertically through the centre (about 20cm high)
*Paper (newspaper)
*sticky brown paper (special type of tape that you need to wet to make it sticky)
*Clay (Red clay[Terracotta], which need to be fired in a kiln to harden.
Here's how we did it;
Step One, Creating the basic shape,
I wrapped the newspaper around the wooden pole, until it formed the basic shape of the head, I held this in place by using the brown sticky tape, which i had dipped in water to activate the adhesive (glue).Step Two, Adding the Clay
To coat the paper with clay, we found out that big piece of clay would just fall off, so we were told to use small pieces, these clay pellets had to be pushed in and firmly smoothed over.Only when a complete sphere of clay had been formed, was the structure strong enough to begin the next phase of building up the profile of the features in the face.Step Three, Moulding the features,
I now added larger pieces of clay to the parts I needed to build up the noise and chin, and also have enough depths to allow indentations of the eyes, I build up the noise and eyes , filling my own face as a guide to the shape i should use for the head. It was an extremely good technique because the head soon took shape, but everyone laughed because my head looked more like the sculpture because I was soon covered in clay.Step four, Firing,
The final phase in producing a bare sculpture is to harden the clay. By placing the clay head in a oven at a very high temperature this will result in,The clay hardening into pottery
The paper inside the head will burn away to leave a hollow sculpture (if the head had been solid clay (without paper in the centre) then the moisture in the centre of the head could not be driven out easily, so the head would stay damp and with a weak soft centre, this could mean it would become mouldy or droop out of shape over a curtain amount of time.
Step five, The finishing touches,
we could finish the head by;mounting it onto a board, Painting, Varnishing or just leaving it raw. This will be the next phase of the project-look out for my next blog...
