Baked!

That's just an empty Pizza Hut box with tiles in them that came from the kiln too... not pie.

These are the laugh study models... the life-size laughing head cast is yet to be completed...

Work in progress

 Sorry about the LAME upside down photos.... Blogger won't let me rotate and my computer shows them straight to begin with... urgh.

Pinhole Photography

Pinhole photography is complete magic. It follows a simple process of making your own camera out of a show box, a can, a matchbox... anything. Like craft class in school. And then you load the camera with photo paper, check for light leakage, and go take photos! The meditative process of taking a photograph with mathematical precision, then taking your treasure to the photolab to develop and seeing the result hanging on the stand in front of you a mere 20 minutes later is marvelous. It is instant gratification. I've been through the process of taking 30-35 photos on an analog SLR over the period of a week or so and developing the photos myself... but that process is lengthy and there is a slight possibility of losing your mojo by the end of it. But this... is bliss. It's magic. It's mesmerising.... 

Here are the negatives as it gets exposed on the photo paper, then photoshopped to positive:

This last one was a 5 minute exposure. I can stay pretty still, huh? I'm looking at the timer on my phone on the other side of my leg :)

The Clay, DONE!

This is waiting to be fired sometime this week, woo hoo!

The Clay, (nearly) Finished

Branches added.....

The Clay, Decorated

Next stage- I carved the gaps, yes; but not all the way through. This way it's still stable and... AWESOME!

The Clay, Scratched

Here'some finishing work on the new piece. The idea here is to make holes only in selected loops so that the structure doesn't get weak. At this stage I wasn't yet sure about what I would do in the blank spaces.

The Clay, Crumbled

This was the first version I did. I carved out the negative spaces and started with the finishing and rascal fellow kept cracking violently! Bah!

So I learned the hard way that too many holes makes for unstable clay....
And I started all over again with a different approach.... awesome that I am.