Project Progress: Puffball Cup

 After spending time thinking and gaining inspiration on the design for my final piece and creating more sketches, I came up with the idea of making a cup based on the Puffball Mushroom.

I personally liked this design a lot, especially the rim of the cup and the slanted base. Since this specific design would be too top heavy to recreate with clay, I thought of a different type of mushroom that looked similar. This is when I came up with the idea to make a Puffball cup. Normally, Puffball mushrooms are closed, however, when broken open the opening forms a similar appearance. Their texture is interesting to me as well, fitting into the theme of my project.

Puffball Mushroom

I made a design sketch of what I wanted the cup to look like. I used watercolour paint in different shades of brown to mimic the texture. I tried to use colours that are similar to the colours available to me in the ceramics workshop. I could use and oxide glaze to recreate the browns.

 

I then went to the ceramics workshop to create my design with clay. I used the pinching method to create a spherical vessel. I used a modelling tool with a small loop to create the texture by gently pushing the soft clay around to create spikes.

Initially, I thought to add grass, since puffball mushrooms grow close to the ground. When I tried adding them without attaching them properly, it simply did not look good and hid the texture too much, which I thought was the most interesting about this piece. To make the grass I used pieces of leftover clay and rolled them out into different sizes.

After finishing the texture I used a fan brush to spread a yellow clay slip thinned with water over the surface of the cup. I used a thicker layer of the yellow slip for the inside of the cup. The yellow slip will function as the base colour of the piece, as I will be using a red oxide glaze over it and rubbing it off slightly with a wet sponge.