Cermics and dinosaurs?

Well, I've been doing lots of things but not telling the blog about any of them.
I finished up another ceramics class and below are my favorite legged items (on a chair I made, of course). I have some fun mugs that I couldn't bare to give away, so I'll post pictures of those soon.


I'm working on some custom colored wooden goods. I'm using a lot of mustard yellow spraypaint. Here is a SAURUS in my very advanced outdoor spraybooth:

plywood, how i miss you...

Since moving to Jacksonville, I haven't had quite the woodworking facilities that I'm accustomed to. I've been making do with a few trips to SCAD's furniture shop and to my parents' house... but I just can't produce the volume that I used to, mainly because now I have a full time job.

So, I decided to take up a new (old) hobby: pottery! I loved sculpture and pottery so much in highschool that my dad built me a pottery wheel, but I haven't even seen it in years. Anyway, here I am with some fresh bowls:


I am certainly enjoying clay again, but I could never leave my favorite material; plywood. Especially not after the awesome writeup that I got on Babygadget!

A little excerpt:
"Looking to add a little 3-D design to your nursery decor? Consider these beautiful sculptures by Sara Schalliol. An industrial designer by trade, this Southern girl spends her evenings working on structural gems for you and me. With their minimal lines and graceful forms, Sara’s plywood creations are contemporary yet somehow soothing - perfect for modern Moms and babes (and Dads!). The orange bird would be great hanging over a crib or changing table. And the dino? He'd be fab just about anywhere. If you're not as obsessed with orange and natural as I am, Sara's sculptures do come in many other colors. All her work ships flat and is easy to assemble."

It certainly made my day, especially since it seems to have generated a lot of interest and a few sales for my birds!

birds and dinosaurs

I finally took some better pictures of my dinosaurs.



And, I finished the big bird I've been working on. 22 inch wing span, oh yeah!


With these birds and dinosaurs, I feel more like I'm making sculpture than design. I think I've been trained not to make objects that don't preform a function, but I've always found value in things that somehow made me feel good, even if this wasn't necessarily a function they were meant to preform. So, the sole function of these objects is mood improvement? Eh?