Thoughts about clay

This blog is about my experience with clay as I progress through the 'clay research' class at UO winter 2008. My first experience with clay came two days ago (well, I made a small figure in clay about 25 years ago, but that is a loooong time ago, so I count that out for now) when we were supposed to do some clay sketches. It sounds simple enough, but it is a little bit harder than what you might think. First off, it dries out after a pretty short time, and then it gets pretty hard to work with. The easy fix is of course to add some water. I didn't quite know where to start, so I just started playing with it, without thinking of making specific things, just hoping that something would magically pop out of the clay as I was 'working' with it. That didn't happen. I was surprised, and understood that this actually was going to be a bit harder than I first thought. Then I got this fantastic idea, that I could set up my DV-camera to do a stop-motion kind of thing, so that maybe that would force me to come up with something creative and fun! Well, I'm not sure if it turned out to be just that, but at least, whatever I made was caught on tape! (well, actually, it was caught on my hard drive, but just the same ...) So, that actually meant that I had made my first claymation movie, and I had some experience with how clay was to work with. I realized pretty soon that this type of clay was not the right sort of clay to do claymation with, but that is just a minor problem. Hopefully I will be able to upload the movie to this blog also, so that everyone can see the masterpiece. It is a classic, I can tell you! :)

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Knut Einar Skjaer