My Very First Sculpture Piece!

My 3-D art class is a pre-requisite for all art students. It is taught by the head of the ceramics department, so of course we ended up working the majority of the semester in different types of clay which has been an ubber fun process of exploration for me.

Below are pics of my very first attempt at figurative art! The concept is based off of the "Night Elf" characters in the on-line game World of Warcraft. This summer, I hope to make other characters as well...

Note from this in-game pic the incredibly long ears and (you can barely see) the long wing-like eyebrows. This is the character design I was using for my first attempt.

This video explains the story behind the Night Elf Characters:

So, I created the bust out of a special type of clay used for mainly for sculpture. I let it air dry for a few days, put it through a bisq(sp?) fire, then covered it in a RACU(sp?) glaze. This specific formula usually turns out a mix of copper and light copper green (like sea green) colors. Racu is a special glazing process that I can't tell you a lot about being such a novice. But, what I can tell you is that I put many coats on the skin of the bust only because in the bisq process, one of the eyebrows broke off (I'll explain more about why somewhere below). Anyhow, the next 2 pics show the bust coming out of the first stage of Racu firing where all the glazed parts are a molten glow.Note her glowing skin, but white hair. The white part (except the eyes which have a white crackle glaze applied to them) is the natural color of the clay after being fired and not glazed. Cool, eh? (Pottery glazes tend to be a mix of powdered glass and such that when heated coats the object resulting in various finishes) So, this awesome dude, Roger, is a Racu expert and was super eager to come in and help me do this because no one in the school had done this process with as complicated a piece as mine before. He's the one who pulled the bust quickly out of the "oven" in the pics above and now he's shown below quickly placing it in a garbage can that has a bunch of dry eucalyptus branches stuffed in the bottom of it.

Here (pic below) you see the bust igniting the contents of the bin which we then quickly covered to begin the "REDUCTION" process of which I can't really explain to you. All I know is that it is needed to pop the colors of the glaze and that anything not covered in glaze will turn sooty black from the fire's smoke. That's convenient since my character's hair and eyebrows should be black anyways. Once cooled, the next pics show what the bust came out looking like. It hasn't been washed off yet in these, so the greens you see here actually turned out a more vibrant emerald (her ears look more black here, but they're mostly a deep emerald with copper inside the ears). Note the dull black of the hair. My instructor is pretty confident that we can reconstruct the broken eyebrow with some type of modeling clay and paint it to match... Oh, and her eyes have a white crackle-glaze on them which also became more vibrant once the soot was washed off.
Note the copper parts of the neck and around the edges where I hadn't applied quite as much glaze. You can also see how much shinier the nose is than the rest of the bust because I'd rubbed some of the soot off of it with my shirt.