My First Clay Cow Sculpture Part 2
Back in 2014, I shared the beginning of one of my early adventures in sculpture: trying to make a cow out of clay.
At the time, my kids were taking pottery classes, and while they worked on their projects, I started experimenting with clay myself.
I had only made a few clay pieces before this one. One of my favorites was an elephant, but the cow was definitely more ambitious.
And because I had promised to share the results no matter how she turned out, here she is.
Learning as I Went
One of the biggest things I was warned about was making sure I didn’t leave air pockets inside the clay.
That sounded simple enough, but when you are building a fairly large animal form a little at a time, it is something you have to keep thinking about.
I only worked on the cow while we were at pottery class, usually a couple of times a week.
Between visits she was wrapped in plastic and kept damp so the clay wouldn’t dry too quickly.
The entire time I was working on her, I wondered whether she would survive the kiln.
Apparently I had reason to worry.
This is what she looked like after her first firing.
And here is the other side.
She did not come through completely intact.
My friend Shellee, who was helping with the pottery classes, told me she nearly cried when she took the cow out of the kiln.
Fortunately, she also thought we might be able to repair her.
Sometimes the Experiment Matters More Than the Result
The funny thing is that this project never really became about creating a perfect clay cow.
It was about trying something completely outside my comfort zone.
By that point, I was already spending much of my creative time needle felting, but working in clay gave me a different way to think about shape, proportion, and three-dimensional form.
Those are the same things I pay attention to when I sculpt an animal from wool.
The material was different.
The process was different.
But the challenge was surprisingly familiar:
How do you take an animal you know in your mind and build it in three dimensions?
Did I Ever Finish Her?
Life moved on, Shellee relocated, and needle felting took over more and more of my creative time.
The clay cow still sitting on a shelf.
Whether she ever became the finished sculpture I imagined really wasn’t the most important part.
What I remember most is trying a new medium, learning how different materials behave, and discovering that I loved sculpting animals no matter what I happened to be using.
Wool eventually became my medium of choice.
But every experiment along the way taught me something.
