Ceramics is FUN!!

South Australia is a festival state and for sure, there are lots of art courses offered by the South Australian School of Art in my uni, like photography, glass blowing, visual arts, and of course, ceramics. Among all these, i prefer photography the most actually, cos its always been something that i wanted to study even when i'm in NTU, too bad the vacancies available were 'so very little few' and bcos there's no final exam, 200+ people were snatching over that tiny 30 slots. Unfortunately...i didn't get in =( So i decided to take it when i'm on exchange. But why on earth did i ended up in ceramics?!? Well, cos i got this email from the photography instructor saying that we need to spend around $150 aussie dollars buying all those films and materials :-S So...i decided to give up, haha, i believe i can take good pictures even without attending classes, lol !!

At this point of time, Li Eng - a new friend of mine from KL, told me that ceramics was actually quite fun so i gave it a try. And here i am...going through the 8th week of school and guess what? I truly enjoyed the lessons a lot. Haha! Here's a pic of Li Eng and our classroom, messy huh?

Its about the end of my first project where i need to do hand coiling, by using clay, rolling it into strips and coil it up into the shape that you want. It can be of any shapes but the requirement is that the forms have to be at least 35 cm tall, thats quite tall huh? And i'll need to make 2 coil forms plus 2 back-ups, just in case any of my forms exploded during the firing. Yea, after coiling and before sending it for firing, i'll need to add a layer of engobe (colour), which is a mixture of hazardous materials @_@ Thats why i need to wear a dust mask and do it in the glaze room, a room specially designed with exhaust fan.

Firing is the last step and what i really hope is that my forms won't go blown up or else i will cry~ man, cos is quite hard to predict whether or not it will turned out nicely after the firing as "Clays are always so unpredictable~" quoted from my instructor, hehe =p Here are some pics of my finished coiled forms. Will update you guys again on how they look like after the firing. Yupe, they are all being fired at the moment. Lol !!
Stay tune!!