I was inspired to create this piece because of the author of the children's' book " The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses," by Paul Goble for my Master work. I planned to make the two main characters of this story as 3D figurines for my project ( the girl,  and the Stailon). I chose to use low fire white clay because it has a smooth finish, with little grit, which made it a nice surface to use underglaze on. And because it was dense enough to  hold its shape. I had planned to use both underglaze and Clear glaze, but in the end I could only use  underglaze. Because, while I was making both figurines, I realized that the surface area of the hooves and the girls feet were too small to be balanced on the stilts in the kiln. And without these the piece would melt permanently onto the kilns surface. But this would only be the case if I chose to use Clear glaze as well. Since underglaze lacks any glass content, there was no need to stilt the pieces, so I only ended up using underglaze. I ran into a lot of challenges for both these figurines. To start, the main challenge for the horse was its legs. I already knew from the start that this would be tricky, since I wasn't just trying to make the figurines as close to the original artists drawing as much as possible, but I was also trying to make the horse as realistically proportional as possible. Which meant I had to keep the legs pretty thin. My initial plan, that I ended up following was to just eyeball the proportions for the horse, and construct it as proportionally as possilble, but on a much smaller scale. I chose to make the horse small, not just to challenge myself, but also because it helped to counter act the problem I knew I was gonna run into with the thin legs. Which was figuring out how to support a large body mass on four thin legs. So I figured by reducing the size of the horse overall, would reduce the amount of strain on the legs since there is less to hold up overall. This did help. However, I found that the initial leg thickness I had decided on, was too fragile to hold up the weight of the main body. I had tried it out, by attaching the 4 legs I rendered to their appropriate spots, and I found that the legs were able to withstand the weight, but only for a short time. So I took some clay from the slop bucket, since it, and using my finger and a sculpting tool, spread it over the main week points on the legs which was primarily all the joints at the knee and ankle of the horse. I found that by using the slob bucket clay, who's consistency was that of wet cement, I could add thin layers of reinforced clay to my horse without needing to score and wet the horses legs, which could have weekend the legs further if I had. But this solution proved very effective and because of it I believe the legs came out beautifully.  Second, the next biggest challenge I ran into was how to drape the clay over the native girls body in a way that would give the impression of flowing cloth. My first idea that I went with, that thankfully ended up working out was to take a piece of left over clay from some slab, wet it thoroughly and roll it out as thin as possible. I would then take the thin panel and cut it down to size so that it would fall from above the girls hip to just above her ankles. I would then wrap the clay araound her waist and using my finger push in to the clay pannel to create the ruffles  in the clay. My first attempt I found that the clay was too wet and the pannel I cut was not enough to cover the area I had wanted. So when I went to make the cloth folding detial the clay ripped, and the pannel didn't reach all the way around the girls waist. So, when I went back the second time, I cut a pannel larger than what I thought I would need, and I made sure that it was a little dryer than the pannel before. I was able to successfully do the cloth folds this time wich I feel came out great. 

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