Sgraffito Design Report

I did a sgraffito design smoothed coil pot for a project I did. It was constructed of clay and about eight inches tall, and a few inches abreast at the base. As it went up the width of the pot increased, through use of bigger coils, until it reached its midpoint in terms of height. Then the width decreased to about the same width as the base. Ergo, it resembles a vase. A rich red underglaze was applied to the pot before firing. Then, using the sgraffito technique, I carved away a snake that coils around the pot using a sgraffito tool. The snake goes around the pot around twice, and wraps about with no particular rhyme or reason which takes up most of the space on the pot, and is similar to a live snake. The edges of the snake are constructed …show more content…
There were some difficulties in the making of this project. I almost did not finish this project on time. Nevertheless, I came in for connections everyday that I could to work on this project and ensure that it would be completed by the due date. Another problem I ran into was that I was not the best at smoothing out coils. This being the second project the class had done. The first project we constructed was an exposed coil pot. This meant that only the inside was smoothed out. I had not done a very large first project and I found that smoothing the inside and outside of this larger project was a tad more difficult than imagined. Albeit, eventually I did get the hang out smoothing coils using a moist sponge to ensure I was molding wet clay, a much easier task than molding leather hard clay, as well as using a rib tool. At the beginning of this project I had expected to accomplish constructing a pot that expanded not only outward, but also inward. I also expected to be able to sgraffito a snake onto the outside of the pot and make the snake at least semi-realistic; hopefully resembling my own pet snake. Lastly, I expected to be able to smooth out every aspect of my pot. At the end of the project I had accomplished these goals. I was successful in making the pot resemble a vase by way of going out and then back in, considering I had not attempted this in the previous project I would consider this a big success. I was further successful in creating