Last shot for now, the clay will need to firm up somewhat before I do more to it, still pretty sticky and soft since I just opened the packages yesterday. It took exactly 100# of clay, I have about one softball sized piece left of the packages I opened for this model.

Now that I have the order of clay at hand that I purchased last week, I started my model of the Detroit Lee Plaza lion. So far after about 3-1/2 hours, I am at this point in my roughing out process:

Now mind you, I really like this ancient Roman carved stone frieze sculpture a lot, so I made my own.   While the few references to this have called it a “griffin” the head is not that of a bird as a griffin requires to be a griffin, but is more of the head of a lion. This is actually more properly called a winged lion (or lioness as it’s sans the mane) It is rich in symbolism, the interesting part is the winged figure is holding a vase and a plate, the vase is discharging a liquid which I will guess was probably meant to be wine. So the…

I started to set up to make a new model a couple of weeks ago and have my usual box form on the easel ready to fill with clay, but then I discovered the raku clay I have had sitting around was too stiff to really work well, and the one box of Continental Course Red clay I have is not enough. I went to Continental’s web site and was going to order just a couple of boxes, 100# worth but the UPS shipping charge shown was like $70 from Minneapolis to Iowa for about $30 worth of clay, so I closed the window and didn’t order it. Wow, the…