For the master artist inspired art sculpture, I decided to recreate the horse and girl from a book my mom used to read to me when I was little. The illustrator of this book is a master artists named Paul Goble, who is known for being an author and illustrator of children books. For this project I decided to make the horse and the girl three dimentional instead of doing a relief sculpture which would have been much easier, but I wanted a challenge. One of my biggest challenges for the horse was figuring out how to balance the main body of the horse on legs that are so thin. I was not completely sure if the horse was going to be able to stand on its own and I considered having to make the girl attached to the horse to help stablize it. Though I didn't want to be to hasty so I decided to just make the horse as anatomically accurate as possible, and just hoped that by placing everything where it should be that it would be able to stand on its own. Just to give my horse the best chance of being able to stand, I decided to make the legs one mm thicker than the legs of photo of the actual horse I was using as a reference, just so that it wouldn't throw off the proportion visually and to just help reinforce the legs a little more. Thankfully by doing so my horse was able to stand. However, I waited until the horse was leather hard before I actully stood it up on its four legs. I waited till then because I new that the legs would have stiffened up a bit more and would be more capable of taking on the weight of the body. Another challenge I ran into was the tail. I wanted to make the tail dynamic and not just hangin down strait, so I had to figure out how to make these thin strands of clay hold themselves up against gravity while being attached to a small point at the tail. This took some time for me to do correctly, but after much trial and error I found that I had to first role out a thin coil then wet only one end ( the end that would attache to the body) but I had to be carful not to oversaturate the other end because then it wouldn't have enough tension to hold up and would flop down towards the floor. Another challenge I ran into was condsidering how to paint it. I wanted to make sure to get the beautiful markings of the original horse in the story on my reacreation so I knew I had to use underglaze. Because underglaze has no glass so when fired it won't bleed into other colors. However when I was done make in the hoarse I realize that the tail and legs were so fragile that it would be risking to try applying wet paint onto them because they would break easily, since they had already broken off many times, just by my attempts to smooth them out using the side of a needle tool. So I decided to wait to paint it until after it had been fired with worked out great. Unfortunately, the tail did end up breaking because I had left the bisk wear in a container with a wet sponge wich made the tail brittle so it broke after me lightly touching it. But despite these challenges, I feel I did a great job on the face of the horse. And my choice to use the edge of the needle tool in order to make the subtle and sharp definitions in the horses cheek and face I feel turned out great. I also feel that I did wonderfully painting the eyes. I had originally decided to leave the eyes black instead of putting in a pupil so I left the sockets hollow when I crafted it, But I was able to paint into the hollow sockets perfectly round irises by taking a fine tipped brush and loading just its tip with a droplet of paint and then gently pressing it into the socket and moving it in very subtle circular motions to create the circular iris. I chose to add a highlight to give it a bit more life.

​

After coming out of the kiln, the bits of tail I had hoped would survive so I could reattach them ended up not making it so I decided to paint the rest off the tail that still remaned. I also noticed that I didn't put enough layers of white for the white patterns on the horses body so I went over the parts of the pattern where you could see the brown underglaze peaking through and put him back in the kiln. Hopefully this time there aren't any see through parts in the white.