For this vessel project, the medium I used was clay. I chose clay because I took a lot of art classes that worked with clay when I was a kid, so I knew a little bit about how to work with it. This vessel is supposed to be a candleholder, big enough to hold a small- to medium-sized candle.
My process for this was pretty simple.First, I rolled out the clay to make a flat sheet, then measured out the dimensions I wanted for the candleholder. After that, I cut out the clay according to those measurements. For the design, I used a marker top and a small jar that I pressed into the clay to leave the imprints. I made sure to press hard enough to leave a deep enough indent without pressing through the clay. On one side, I cut out the smaller circles and the large inner circle, leaving the indent around the large circle. The scratches at the bottom of the sides were a mistake; I had planned to wrap a clay strip around the bottom, but ended up running out of time. Also, the strip I was going to use ended up being too dry. I chose a gray glaze for the outside to make the design pop out, and I used the blue for the inside to contrast the gray and yellow outside.
For this vessel project, I decided to make a pencil holder made of pencils. I chose to use pencils because I thought it was funny and creative. This vessel will hold pencils, pens, other assorted office supplies, or anything else I feel like putting into it.
This project took a lot longer for me to do. First I had to decide what pattern to use: whether I'd use sharpened or unsharpened pencils, how I would arrange them, etc. I decided to use unsharpened wooden pencils because I knew I had a great many of them in my desk that I knew I would never use. So, I gathered my many unused wooden pencils. I also decided to use cheap novelty erasers for the bottom and bought a piece of craft wood for the base. Putting together the pencils, I found out superglue was not an effective bonding agent for gluing pencils together. Luckily, I remembered I had gotten safety-orange duct tape for my birthday, so I just used that. I would take the number of pencils that I needed for one side, lined them up in the order I wanted them in, put a square of cardboard over them to make it rigid, and put strips of duct tape down. Once all the sides were taped, I taped the corners together to make the box. I took the project in to hot glue the edges and do the finishing touches. I also tried to glue the erasers onto the base, but found out hot glue was not an effective bonding agent for gluing cheap erasers onto craft wood. I later glued them on using tacky glue.
