One of my favorite classes I was able to take at Cape Fear Community College was Ceramic I during the Spring, 2019 semester, a class focused on sculpting with different hand-building techniques. The first type of hand-building we were taught was pinch-pots, where you form a ball of clay, dig a hole in the center with your thumb, and then press around the clay from the base towards the edges to pinch the ball form into a pot. Our first assignment then was to create a sculpture using two pinch-pots combined into a fully enclosed spherical form. Fortunately for me, it did not have to remain a rounded shape, only include one, so I eagerly thought of ways to turn my project into a frog. After looking at images of different frog species, I realized there were not many species more rounded in form than a Horned Frog, and decided that was what I would create for my assignment.

We familiarized ourselves with pinch-pots in class, where I was able to practice rolling smooth balls of clay and pinching them into pots of different thicknesses and shapes. After some practice, I brought some of my gray clay home to work with, and with printed references of particularly rounded Horned Frogs in front of me, set out to sculpt something resembling one. First, I pinched one pot meant to represent the frogs’ head and upper body, and purposefully pressed my clay against the table as I was working and pressed different amounts in different places to make sure my pot came out somewhat head shaped. Then, I pinched an almost perfectly round pot with a matching opening size for the back of the body, and scored and slipped the edges of my pots to form them together. Once I had thoroughly joined my pots the whole way around, I could afford to be more forceful with them. Something we had been taught in class was that having a sculpture filled with air can be helpful in keeping the sculpture supported from within, so with my pots joined I was able to press, squeeze, and hit my sculpture into shape. Finally, to turn my sculpture into a Horned Frog, I sculpted small legs, arms and horned eyes to attach and carved into my pot a wide grin.

After poking air holes into my pot and having it fired in the school studios’ bisque kiln, I could have simply dipped it into one of our 5-gallon buckets of glaze. However, Horned Frogs are known for their beautifully colorful markings, and I wanted to do the species’ justice by capturing that in my piece. So, I decided to bring my sculpture to one of my favorite places in town, Paint-N-Play ceramic painting studio, and spend a Saturday painting it however I wanted. As horned frogs can come in a variety of colors, I decided to paint mine yellow along the sides and green on its back, with deep brown markings across its body. As a slow painter, I barely finished painting my Horned Frog before closing time, and to my disappointment accidentally broke off two of its delicate toes while trying to rotate it. Even so, I could not help enjoying the experience of getting to paint something I had sculpted myself for a change at Paint-N-Play, and I was reassured when my professor e-mailed me back and told me that he had ways of reattaching my sculptures’ toes.

When I brought my sculpture back in that week, my professor helped me reattach my frogs’ toes with epoxy resin and put it into the bisque kiln again, thinking that would protect its underglazes so that I could then safely coat it in a layer of clear glaze afterwards. To our surprise, with just that single firing the underglazes took on a beautiful, glassy finish, and my sculpture was already complete. With how guilty I felt about breaking my sculpture, I was amazed it came out so beautifully in the end. While it ended up a bit more yellow than I intended, I felt that also gave it an extra cheerful effect, and I was glad to see that my last-minute addition of white reflective flecks turned out to be so visible in the result. Every time I looked at my happy Horned Frog I could not help smiling, and it is that sculptures’ success that kept me motivated and enthused through the rest of my time in Ceramic I.