5 gardenias out of air-dry clay
For this assignment, I decided to make 5 similar flowers out of clay, and I had a few reasons for that. First of all, childhood trauma. When I was a kid, the teacher asked me and my classmates to make a cup out of clay and decorate it in a style that is known in Russia as “Gzhel”. It is actually very pretty blue and white ceramics. My cup was small, ugly, and blue without white, and it would take me way too long to explain why. I never touched any kind of clay ever since then.
I also was inspired by a few ITP-peers who made beautiful clay settings and characters for their Animation projects. And I thought that making 5 similar flowers is at the same time challenging and promising since even if they are not completely similar… well, that’s flowers.
At first, I watched hundreds of videos about how to make flowers out of clay, polymer clay, gum paste, and other sculpturesque materials. That was really fun.
I also wanted to make gardenias instead of roses, just because I love this flower and its smell (ironically, my final gardenias smell really bad).
I bought air dry clay — I never heard about this material before but probably just because I wasn’t specifically looking, and regular modeling clay, “plastilina”, in case something goes wrong and I wouldn’t be able to create romantic pale sculpture-looking gardenias. So, plan B was red roses.
At first, I made a test flower — just to get a sense of the material.
I felt like everything’s okay (I was wrong) and made five equal buds.
Then I made tons of petals because I truly believed that making similar petals would lead me to create similar flowers (it would but…)
The material started to dry out really quickly, and I eventually got something reminding of ugly mutant oysters. So, I had 6 first pancakes.
First pancakes (below).
Then I started all over again, keeping in mind not to make all the petals at the same time but one-two-three at a time.
Something reminding on my homeland on the map:
Somewhere halfway I realized I wanna use all the material I have, and I had a lot.
Ready, sad, romantic, looking like an old sculpture. I painted tips of the petals a little bit — with dark rose color.
