In a box, in the corner of a spare room, under a table, I've had this slightly cruddy papier mache bowl tucked away, being ignored, for the last ten years or so. When events conspired to move this box moved a few feet from my PC, what else could I do but grab a camera and finally document this er, fine piece of work.
Not that anyone would guess from the highfalutin potential designs I was churning out for my Junior Cert. Art, Craft and Design project, but this was the phoned-in, basic-ass bowl I made for the craft part of the project. And worse still, it was always the only one I ever intended to make. All that other stuff was just complete horse shit :D
A little sample of what I'm talking about. Obviously these would all have have been ceramic. But that would involve some actual work, and screw that.
It's not the basic, unimaginative shape of thing that makes me dislike it though. It's everything else, from the deformed, mismatched flowers to the sloppy painting to the dodgy, green rim job. :D Ugh, and that weird green bit, sort-of leaking down from inside the rim: just awful.
I guess it couldn't really have turned out too much better though. I grudgingly cobbled together the bowl itself in the middle of my Christmas holidays in 1999 and I ran off the entire paint job one Sunday evening around February, colouring in a design that, ironically, I barley even planned out. The paints I had to borrow from the art room. And despite being told by art teacher to take them, I still snuck them out in as ninja-like a fashion as I could, knowing that two or three teachers were bound to shout at me for stealing them without taking even a nanosecond to consider an alternative scenario. That's the type of awesome school I went to folks. :D
But enough of that. Let's take a closer look:
I kind of like this sunflower actually. It has a nice abstract thing going. The red flower to the right looks pretty good too. Everything else is a bit of a mess though.
You know, both of these purple flowers could have turned out pretty well if I put a bit more effort into them. Everything else is pretty much a disaster though. And how did I get those blotches of red and green paint onto it? And how did I leave it like that?
And holy shit, I've just noticed that I made one of those fuchsia flowers green. (Those are supposed to be fuchsias, by the way.) I didn't even notice that at the time. Bloody hell, what a complete fuck up this whole thing was. :D
Purple, purple, purple, purple, purple. Okay, maybe not a complete fuck up. This sunflower is pretty awful though, lacking any kind of definition whatsoever. Ugh, and those bloody green bits. The only justifiable reason I could see for putting the two big green blobs on the thing would be to cover up some major screw up I made, but that wasn't the case at all. I put them there intentionally, on both sides of the bowl.
Compared to the red flower here, this blue one just looks deformed.I wasn't even trying here. :D
They're a bit messy (surprise!), but I quite like the bold, vibrant colours on the daffodils here. I'm guessing the much lighter one on the right was intentional, but the contrast between them looks makes this look really odd.
Moving over to left a bit more, these three flowers aren't too bad. The left one needs a bit more shading, but I quite like the look of the other two. Well, the heads at least; the stems are really pretty terrible, just like every other one on here.
Shifting back a bit to the right, between the two last sections, I think this is probably the bowls best, most competent-looking side.
The inside. Up until the day I was painting the bowl, I didn't actually plan to do anything inside it. I quickly came up with this just before I did it. Again, it's more the dodgy shading here than the design itself that lets things down. The middle flower here isn't too bad actually. But ugh, look at that daffodil.
I'm pretty sure more effort went into drawing this rough sketch of the inside than into any aspect of the actual bowl.
Aside from being a bit too dark a shade of blue, the paint job I did on the background really is shoddy. You get a pretty good view here of just how patchy it is here. It definitely needed a second coat, but I don't think I even noticed that at the time.
The rim; expertly done just as you'd expect.
Didn't they realise how this would affect the future value? I guess this is my exam number, written on by someone with a marker.
And with that, back into it's box it goes, banished to forever reside on top of a very high shelf. Well, until someone finally breaks it anyway. If you'd like to see some more pics, I've put up practically every one I took of it in this Picasa gallery:
Uh, have fun. :D
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