Face Jugs with Year 9

This was a fantastic project that I completed with a group of Year 9 students while I was undertaking my teaching rounds.

Many of the students in the class were disengaged, and didn't particularly want to study art, yet they had selected it as an elective. Thinking back to my Secondary School years, I remembered that my classes would always love it when we had the opportunity to work with clay, this was the starting point for the 'Face Jug Project'.

We began the project by looking at the human face. Students learned about the proportions of the face and worked with pen and paper to explore the shapes that make up the face. We looked at individual features, breaking them down into simple shapes.

http://4myp.blogspot.com.au/

Following this two dimensional exploration, student began to work with clay. Watching my tutorials, students produced a trial eye, nose and mouth. This process allowed them to get used to using the new medium of clay, learning how to join two pieces together and manipulate the material to produce life-like features.

I showed them a range of YouTube tutorials for the different features to show them diferent artists techniques.

Once satisfied by their trial features, we began work on the final jugs. Students used 'slab construction' to make the base structure of their jugs. They had to ensure that they were quite thick because they would need to cut into them later when adding the facial features.

Once the base structure was complete, students began adding their personalised facial features. While some students decided to create a well-proportioned face, others decided to make theirs cartoon-like. The jugs were glazed and under glazed giving them a range of uses.

Here are some of the finished products...

This was a really successful project for this Year 9 group. They really enjoyed  working through the process and most of them were very happy with their final artworks.

I think that the key to the success of this task was allowing students to have some fun with their designs. Allowing them to create dis-proportionate faces ensured that those who were less confident with their clay-manipulation skills felt like they could have a go and make their pots look a little strange.