Process : Sketch to Porcelain Sculpture

From a sketch to a porcelain sculpture, here is the whole process and history of this commissioned piece.

2 years ago I was contacted by another artist about a commission, the brief was : a big porcelain sculpture with 16 animals, the animal species were listed as follows :

• *A bear
• *A butterfly
• *A bull
• *A chicken
• *A hawk
• *A cub
• *A dolphin
• *A duck
• *A giraffe
• *A rat
• *An otter
• *A pig
• *A puppy
• *A shrimp
• *A fox
• *A wolf

This was to be white with black details and no pink. This piece was to be shown in an exhibition along other works on a defined themed.

I sketched two concepts and worked for a six months on this. It was my first “big” piece, destined for an art show in South America.

Sculpting took several weeks between the actual work and the extremely slow drying of everything, I was STRESSED. If any part broke I wasn’t sure I would be able to patch it up. The main difficulty here was to create animals standing on all four and then others that were attached or floating in between the standing characters. The whole piece also needed some kind of flow and direction. I chose to add a porcelain base in order to make this more stable and sturdy.

Painting the details was also very challenging because I had to turn the dried piece all over to access the little eyes and noses and ears and paint them as delicately as possible. Each animal has its little character and although it’s very little paint, it carries a huge impact.

Another challenge was putting together very different sizes, from the giraffe to the tiny shrimp, and I wanted to both stay on a believable scale, stay readable and avoid porcelain width disparities which would have created cracks.

Interestingly enough, I took so long sculpting and drying it that the whole process went almost flawlessly, you can see in the pictures the base did disconnect from parts of the flock of animals but it was for the best in the end.

Here is the sculpture from the first firing to the glazed and then finished piece.

The first firing was the most dangerous because I had to make sure nothing broke in the kiln and in the transfers from the shelves to the kiln and back again.

I then glazed the piece in several parts and made sure the glaze would keep the whole thing together in the end.

This is the finished piece. I’m proud of how it turned out. The commission aspect of it I will probably not redo, not in this form anyways but it was a good experience.