Zxo

A small sculpture, now possibly, maybe, probably finished. My first plan was to make it much lighter and more grey with blue-green tones on top and brown spots along the sides from below, sort of. But a lot of the things I do end up in a brown-beige-grey kind of colour scheme so I'll try to keep my hands away from this very blue thing.

After all, I'll make more faces and add more papier-maché to them. I want to make more like this in different versions, with different expressions and different pointy things sticking out.

The thing is made out of stoneware clay but with a kind of papier-maché built on, easily seen on photo number 1. It attaches very well to the clay and allows me to play with the different materials in different ways. Which is nice. I like it.

The whole thing then painted with acrylics which feels like cheating when there's clay involved but really doesn't have to be. As long as it's not supposed to be food safe it doesn't matter.

Shapes and lighting is tricky. I kinda like the shape of this face-octopus, but only when I hold it up and see it clearly. At a distance it just looks like a lump of clay. So I'm going to paint it and hopefully it'll look like what it is a bit more.

Stoneware clay things waiting in line to be painted. All of them looking more cold/blueish in their colours here than they do right now in natural daylight. Paints and colours and lights sure is a thing to keep in mind and I shouldn't be painting in a dark room, at night, with cold lamp light. I still do though. It's just what it is.

Greenware, stoneware clay thingy I was working on. Basically a 3d doodle without any real plan, but the likelihood of a face being involved is always high. It has since then been fired and done and I might paint it, if the acrylics-on-stoneware works out with other pieces.

In this photo I was playing around a bit with coloured light. I don't do that often, even though I can easily change the colour of the light above my desk. Changing the colour of the light sure puts things in... a new light, one might say.

First post of the year yey.

This is a stoneware clay sculpt, ~85mm tall. It's made from a mix of reused clays in the studio I go to so I didn't know what colour and texture it was going to get. It also has a few spots from one of the clay types involved.

A "close enough" Rudolph. Anything vaguely reindeer shaped with something red on the nose is giving Rudolph vibes. Or even anything on four legs with a red nose. Actually a lot of things quickly give Rudolph vibes if you add a shiny red nose to them. It's either Rudolph or clown.

Happy Yule or Christmas or Winter Solstice or whatever happens to be your cup of tea.

I uploaded this little doodle on BlueSky and it was immediately labelled "Adult Content: Explicit sexual images". Which I can kinda see, but also not. It's just a machine looking at it, sure, and I guess the pose is unusual outside of... certain contexts.

So anyway I wanted to try something. I wanted to draw some random stuff and see how "sexual"/"nude" it had to get, and in what way, for the system to flag it. The purpose was never to post sexual stuff without getting flagged, so I don't think anyone would mind.

Anyway...

This cakefish did not get labelled. Potatoes successfully smuggled, one might say.

This one also did not get labelled. I thought maybe the shape of the legs could trigger it, but that wasn't enough.

This one was though. It got the label "Sexually Suggestive: Does not include nudity." Which is kinda fair because I think most adults, or at least a huge chunk of them, would be able to see where the extra heads had been placed. Still, I don't think it's a sexual drawing at all.

This is how far I've got. It's interesting what shapes get stuck in the filters and what doesn't. I'm actually fine with it catching things in the grey zone, or even some that shouldn't have the labels. While I do want people to be allowed to post sexual stuff online, I also want it to be easy to opt out of it.

Wanted to doodle for a bit just to relax. I've been quite stressed out, anxious and most likely a bit depressed for a while now but doodling kind of works temporarily as long as I manage to forget about reality and having to pay bills etc etc.