the metamorphosis of stone.

it's fired! hurrah~ see the difference between painted and unpainted ^^ the painted one seriously look like rocks - therefore i am HAPPY. :D i haven't really touched oxides at all since the box thing in sec 1, and before that i've never ever used oxides before so using them now felt like trying to rediscover old territory ehehe. I'm really proud of this picture ^^ though the significance is actually in the memories that it bring up~ Glazing my finals gave me a totally new look on oxides since my impression of them in sec 1 was just that they were really monotonous and didn't give me many colours to play with - which is probably true if you used them on smooth pieces with not much texture.. But the oxides really impressed me with the way they just neatly flowed into all the nooks and crannies of the clay, darkening some areas and lightening in others. it's ability to be sponged off also helped greatly in adding tonal value to my sculptures :D

Below is a picture of how i turn a white, fired, irregular lump of clay (bottom left) into a rock :D adding grey oxide first (top left) gets the glaze into all the little cracks and dents in the clay while it just slops thinly over smoother surfaces, and this effect works even better if you just slop the oxide on with the brush and let it kinda roll down the sides. oxide = tonal magic<3 i originally had all my rocks look like just step 2, but i decided to try and experiment on a rock and slop some diluted red+grey oxide (top right) and the effect was so good. red+grey somehow equals a really nice rustic brown that made the rocks look more organic and natural, as though the rock had been sitting in soil for years and the colour of the earth sort of diffused into it :D but then it became a bit too dark and there was not enough contrast between the lighter and darker parts for my liking so i sponged it, letting the sponge just clean away any part of the rock it could reach, getting a nice natural highlight for the final rock (bottom right) ^^ the lighter parts of the rock became a light red cause of the oxide but its fine. it adds to the rustic feel ^^

@hope_neverends

title inspired by my mortal's twitter dn c:

Anyway this post is about how i got inspired to have my central idea as hope owo

BIRDS. <3 i love birds :D so chirpy and chipper and full of life ^^ i love watching sparrows and mynahs hop around in my garden pecking around at the ground. the same way a scenic painting of grasslands and trees or a park is never complete without some birds in the background. they just add so much liveliness to everything :D they also aptly symbolise hope, a concept i have always loved due to the pure, positive nature of it ^^
the moment i got inspired by birds, i started thinking of how to integrate them in and the first thing i thought of was a bird house :D it's relatively easy to make and it can house a candle AND has holes for the light to shine through! (fine there's only one hole but i can carve more :D) my concept for the bird house is that since "home is where the heart always is", and birds symbolise hope, the home of birds would symbolise that "where there is hope, there will your heart be, also". (partially koped from harry potter ^^)
this is a snowdrop flower (: i stumbled upon it when researching on what flowers symbolise hope, and found this - a small pure white flower with three petals and a heart shaped center. i drew this out of a picture on google where it was night time and the whiteness of the snowdrop shone in the darkness like a bright light, similar to a candle in the darkness. at first i wanted to make a snowdrop shaped candle holder, but i scrapped the idea in the end :/
and now, *drumroll* the central (ish) object in my sculptures! the candle. i drew this from a picture from google and in the picture the candle was in complete darkness so the candle was the only source of light in the entire picture. candles generally symbolise hope. people light them in sky lanterns, people light them and set them to float on rivers, people light them to illuminate their surroundings, and people light them for warmth in the cold. And where in other places, fire is a dangerous, unstoppable, life-destroying force, when lighted on a candle, it transforms into a source of light, warmth, and hope.

TREES.

A tree of life :) I really liked how knobbly everything looked. it gave the feeling that this tree is very old, wise, and all-knowing~~ plus the apple is so cute :D Anyway, this work was more of helping me explore with the texture and form of a tree, the bumps and knobbles and twists and turns. Sketching (and shading) this tree helped me better understand the natural form of a tree, and thus helped me get closer to my goal of making a realistic looking tree. ^^
This tree was more of prep for my summer tree. Although the drawing looks rather simple, it was of great significance to me, as it was after i finished it and looked at it that i realised that the best way to capture the essence of summer was to make a tree with a thick crown full of leaves. Summer is the only time trees are at their prime of leaves and this thus led to the design of my summer tree, to make the candle holder out of the crown of leaves (it being the main representational point of summer) C:

this winter tree serves the same purpose as the summer tree above, providing me with inspiration for my winter tree. The whole image of a tree like that sprouting out of snow also got me imagining a forest of leafless trees, perched on fluffy white snow, and got me thinking - what else is there in winter?
this is a composition for a sculpture i originally planned to make before the seasons idea popped into my head. I was playing around with the idea of life without hope and faced a problem of how best to depict a dead tree. I could simply make the tree leafless, with its branches dry and devoid of life, but it seemed too similar to winter trees. So I decided on fallen logs.
oh this has to be one of my favourite and most successful sketches ever :D I used an eraser (heh.) for the hanging leaves (?) to try and mimic the glowing effect and it worked quite well ^^ It's the tree of souls from avatar, and I found it fitting for my coursework as the movie depicts it as the closest thing to a tree of life. But more than its use in my coursework, this drawing is significant to me because I have never really drawn something so realistic before. It gave me confidence and showed me that I can draw well if I set my mind to it ^^