#ok and while I'm thinking about it: shoutout to willow aka @moldspace on tumblr for her zine ''how to evolve''

[robinsceramics]

im curious as to about how long each of your pieces takes?? it took me two class periods to be satisfied with the pinch pot we just made in ceramics class (though that’s probably also because im very much a perfectionist) so i can’t imagine how long a whole critter would take

it really depends!! some of them (unpainted, simple shapes) take as little as five minutes; some of them (large, complex shapes with very detailed painting) take as much as 10 hours.

I have gotten way faster over the years, though, so don't think I'm just some natural genius! the skills of sculpting build on each other. Just last year it took me three hours to make a simple fox, and now I can bust out a really nice fox (with toe beans!) in two hours. it just takes time and repetition to get there <3

and hey congrats on being in a ceramics class!! I hope you have fun with it!! If you like critters, I recommend stealing some of the clay and making some kind of toadish blob out of it and firing it in the kiln, as long as your studio masters won't get mad about it. the joy of making a lumpy little guy is unmatched.

examples of sculpture + time counts below the cut!

Little guys like this tiny cicada, which is a design I've done so many times that I can make them on autopilot, are in the 5-15 minutes range to sculpt. bunnies, chickens, wizards, and mini-cats are like that for me too!

but if I add the time it takes to paint them, even simple sculptures can end up taking much more time—for instance, this starry chicken took only five minutes to make but about an hour to paint.

then when you get into the more complex shapes, those can take a lot of time—this anthro coyote took me 3 hours to sculpt because it was a complex shape AND I was unfamiliar with making anthros so I was learning as I went:

and when you add complex designs to complex sculptures, you end up with projects like this peach-tree bear, which took three hours to make and five hours to paint, so that's eight hours in one sculpture:

and eight hours is about my limit for sculptures I'm going to sell. BUT. when I'm making things for myself, I'm willing to spend even MORE time on them to make them perfect for my own tastes. I tend to spend the most time on fanart sculptures—it takes a lot more time to make a sculpture perfectly on-model to a pre-existing character than it does to make up a whole new thing. So the sculpture that has taken me the most time so far in this batch is this JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fanart sculpture, Star Platinum:

three hours to make the body, seven hours to paint him—Star has taken me ten hours total so far!!