Disclaimer: I'm a beginner at clay modelling and carving so forgive me if say anything wrong and please correct me. Ok thank-you.
When it came to my notice that for my second semester in architecture school we would have to work with clay I was super pumped. I was beyond excited to get started with clay work. Ever since I was little I have always been fond of clay and it's binding properties , especially earthen clay.
I remember when I was about nine or ten years old , I played in the wet clay feild for the first time. My family and I went on a one day trip to Village which was about an hour away from my city. We had to go trekking and play in the waterfalls , after which we would walk back down from the hills and then play in the clay fields. This was the part I was the most excited for. I finally get to play in the clay fields!
I played for hours along and then finally in the end I was disheartened that we had to leave the place. I would have chosen to live that kind of life over this stressful city life anyday at this point in my life. Talking about how clay has always fascinated and how I would have to work with it for my second semester in college was an excitement that lasted only till about I actually started carving the clay block.

How we started off

We started off by collecting clay from a pit where the clay was stored in the workshop ( place where we do our studio works.). After collecting the clay we soaked it poured water on it and let it sit for about ten to fifteen minutes and then we started stamping the clay as you can see in the photograph above. I was so excited to do this , even though it was a tedious process since the clay was dry. So what essentially happens is the clay softens due to the heat of the body. And after about half an hour of stamping we then started casting into blocks , which we would utilise carve later. Pardon me , because I didn't document the process of making of these clay blocks. As someone who's new to this material , in terms of understanding it's properties it was bit of a struggle in the beginning. After casting the block we were asked to keep the block for about 24 hours and then slice it.

The brief given to us by our professor:

There's point A and there's point B. A person has to traverse from point A to point B. Play with levels and understand the kinestethics.

I got to be honest with all of you , I literally had no idea as to what I could maybe do for this model. I always have concepts , but I struggle when it comes to design. But yes I overcame this and challenged myself , you will see that in my coming posts. In terms of neatness I wasn't able to achieve it. It's all about practice with clay. The more you work with it the better understanding you have of it , that goes for any sort of a material.

Final model:

This is how my model turned out to be. I wasn't satisfied at all with my work. But I had to accept that it was bad , and just try getting better at this. Which obviously took me quite a few weeks to get myself to work on making better models. Kinda ashamed of my first one , but kinda happy that it led me to thinking more. Ofcourse it took me a few tries but better late than never.

Below are some photos I took during the process:

Thank you so much if you have read this far. It means a lot to me. Please stay tuned for the future posts. I'm going to try to be more consistent and active in this community 💖.