I've seen a lot of artsy stuff on here, but one thing I don't see a lot of is stuff in three dimensions. Some of it's pixel work, some are sketches, some are tablet works. Well, I'm not an artist (anymore), but in high school, I was in a ceramics class. And I made a few things of varying quality.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a genius when it comes to art. I suck at drawing and I did have some degree of skill with clay, but deadlines and being only able to work about an hour a week was a bit of a pain. That and when the materials you work with can as easily work against you, it's not really easy. So here are a few things that I did way back when.

And yes, there's some video-game related stuff here. We'll get to that in a sec.


Would you believe this is a teapot? Yes, I realize that it's incredibly massive. And yes, I realize it has no handles. But come on, it was around fifty pounds, and I didn't have the kind of technical know-how to make a handle that'd handle this beast. What's neat about this one is that it had two sealed chambers. You'd pour whatever out of the mouth of either the snake or the fish, and you could store two different things at once, though of course it'd be a rotten pain to pour this way. The snake lost his teeth around the time I took this picture.


And this side's the fish. Yeah, not really a good fish, but I had to have something to go with it.


This was supposed to have Whispy Woods. You know, from Kirby? Yeah. Don't say a thing about its anatomy, but the glaze I used really didn't turn out the way I expected at all. You'll see this a lot, sadly. That's one of the bad things about using the stuff. It can turn out amazingly well, but it can also go disastrously bad. The stuff I used here was supposed to have been almost a wood-grain look, but it's like I slung mud at a mound of butter. I didn't get to make a fake leaf canopy so it just looks ugly as hell.


This is the opposite half of the evil >:( sun from Super Mario Bros. 3. I could've done some more work on the corona effect, but good God that is a ginormous smile. The paint I used wasn't glaze, but it was fired in a kiln on the clay work the same way, just that it wasn't shiny or anything. It didn't turn out too bad, though I goofed up doing the eyes if you look closely.


I'm not entirely sure what this was supposed to have been. A little image of Sonic yes, but did that blue turn out dark. I know Sonic is a lot lighter, but again, the glaze did its own thing. Still looks great, just not accurate.


And this is probably the best thing I ever made. Mind you, this was in 2004, before Sonic Heroes and 10 other games came out. Shadow still had just the one appearance. We were told to make a bust of something. Naturally, I could've gone with Sonic, but where's the challenge with that?


The hardest part of course were the quills. Sonic's go downward, but Shadow's bend back upwards. Naturally, clay doesn't like doing things like that, so it still baffles me as to how they even stayed. Not one broke off after I set them on the head. I had only a handful of images to use as reference and this was as best that I could remember.


The most disappointing thing was, again, how the glaze turned out. The black wasn't consistent, and the red...God, the red. It looks pink! Of course, red is one of the hardest colors to work with because of its activation range, and I had a poor selection of glaze (as it was all teacher-provided). I managed with what I had, but...


It would've looked a lot better had the colors all turned out the way I wanted. Of course, it was a school project, but I actually put a lot of effort into it, unlike most other things. Amusingly enough, of the things that broke/fell off, his nose and chest tuft were the only casualties. The quills are STILL on there to this day!



Here's a few more assorted pieces. I did a skeletal set of dinnerware (which turned out well enough for how difficult it was), and put a couple other pieces on display.

So yeah, there's all that I had to say. I actually do miss working with clay. Don't get me wrong, I've had my share of projects just completely explode in the kiln, or something go terribly wrong, and so on. I had quite a bit of freedom too. My projects were literally vague. "Make a dinnerware set." "Make a bust of something." And I was let go to plot. I really pushed to involve gaming into my work when I could because it was really important to me, and really, I wasn't really so creative on my own, so I tried my hand at recreating something like Shadow with my own hands. And for the most part, it worked out all right.

The bad thing about clay is, unlike paper and pencil, you can't just make something cool anywhere. And it's pretty pricey too. Even if you do scrape together some clay to use and shape, you still need a kiln to fire it (well, you can leave it as-is but it won't be as strong). And then it'll still need color. You can use acrylic paint, but that usually leaves a dull look. Glaze makes it shiny, but it can be inconsistent and nearly impossible to correct.

But damn if those weren't some great years I spent in Ceramics class. Thanks for reading.