Arts and Crafts VI: A Tale of Two Dinosaurs

 

I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation in pottery.

 

Mostly, I throw circular objects like bowls, pitchers, etc. Sometimes, I blend handbuilt (working with clay directly) with things built on the wheel. I have a few things I’ll talk about at some point. But I don’t usually do straight handbuilt objects.

 

There are some superlative handbuilders in the studio. If I squint hard enough, I can hold my own against the wheel people but I can’t hold a candle to the good handbuilders.

 

One day I had some idle time waiting for some material to get dry enough to trim and I had a bit of extra clay. So, I shaped a small Stegosaurus. That was cool. I got kind of into it and decided to work on something larger, a Brachiosaurus—Brachi to the right.

 

Putting him together was a challenge because clay is pretty plastic when it’s wet. This is why his legs are quite thick. I wanted to make sure he didn’t collapse while he was drying.

 

(Note the tiny stegosaurus next to him. That was the little guy that started all this.)

 

When he was dry enough, I trimmed and underglazed him. I did get his legs a little thinner but didn’t get the musculature quite right.

 

I went with the color concept for dinosaurs. The only living descendants of dinosaurs are birds and they make use of color all the time. Many modern reptiles such as iguanas and anoles use color as well. This can be for camouflage but also for mating purposes. Box turtles, for example, have red rimmed eyes for the males. Ocean iguanas get quite colorful in mating season. So, I figured Brachi is a young male on the prowl.

 

This came out pretty well in the final version. I’m not terribly pleased at how the underglazing turned out—the colors streaked some. Also, while the head came out fine, for one reason or another the outer True Clear coating didn’t take. Either I failed to dip it properly or it just didn’t stick.

 

Lophi was quite a bit more ambitious.

 

Lophi is a Parasaurolophus, a genus of the duck-billed dinosaurs. Though he doesn’t have much of a bill. The crest is one of the features that makes him interesting. It has been surmised that Parasaurolophus might have made sounds through it. In 1997, they managed to produce sound through a reproduction of a well-preserved skull. You can here it here.

 

Lophi was problematic in a number of ways. Unlike Brachi, Lophi’s legs were comparatively thin. Parasaurolophus didn’t weigh over five tons—compared to Brachiosaurus’ 28-47 tons. In addition, I had a much more difficult neck and tail arrangement and I wanted him to be more dynamic. Lophi is looking back over his shoulder at something.

 

All of this concerned me and so I built Lophi with braces as shown.

 

I was quite pleased how he held up. I tried to capture as much of the muscular anatomy as I could. Lophi is a juvenile—hadrosaurs have some evidence of rearing their young—so his legs are thinner than an adult. In addition, I didn’t get his feet quite right. Parasaurolophis has a sort of thick chicken foot and I have him here with a sort of hoof/pad.

 

Then, catastrophe.

While I was working on him, he fell forward onto that raised leg, breaking it off at the upper arm. With the help of several people in the studio, I reattached the arm and placed it directly in the bisque kiln. 

 

The path is green (uncooked) to bisque (chalk like) to glazed. Bisque fires at a much lower heat than glazed but it firms up the product. My hope was that the reattachment would hold through the bisque process and be strong enough to hold afterward.

 

It did. Unfortunately, I was in such a sweat to get him dipped and into the glaze kiln I took no pictures of him as bisque. As with Brachi, there was a problem with the underglaze streaking. I repainted him, dipped him in True Clear, and put him on the glaze shelf, hoping for the best.

 

Mostly, everything worked. There was a glazing mishap with his tail. I suspect Lophi fell against an adjacent pot. He is no longer able to stand on three legs and falls onto his raised arm. If you look closely, you might notice that his head and forward body are lower. He bent a little in the kiln. This is likely how he came in contact with another pot. 

 

I’ve been thinking if/how to repair this defect. I’ve been told Mod Podge can be used in some way to correct it. However, when Wendy saw it she made a different suggestion. What if a bird had landed on Lophi’s tail? I could construct a bird to sit on the tail. That would give something for Lophi to look at as well as weight down the tail so he doesn’t fall forward. 

 

I’ll have to think about that.