The teacher has become the student...

For the last five years, I've been teaching adult pottery classes for Foothills Park & Recreation District here in Colorado. Right now though, I'm taking some time off from teaching in order to be a student myself! Foothills has just started offering sculpture classes with the very talented Bob Allison, and I had my very first sculpture class last night. Despite working in clay for ten years now, I've never done any clay sculpture. I've found that most clay classes don't offer it as part of the standard curriculum.

Here's what I had by the end of class last night. Bob is a wonderful figurative sculptor, so I'm taking advantage of his expertise and trying my hand at a portrait head of my three-year-old niece. So far, I think it looks a bit like a generic monkeyish alien, but hopefully it will resemble her in the end! I'll take photos every week and post them here to track my progress.

It was so lovely to be a student again. Lately, I've been into taking more classes and really enjoying getting to be the person with lots of questions, instead of needing to be the person with lots of answers. I took a really wonderful World Ceramics class at Arapahoe Community College this past January with the always-awesome Kathy Holt. If you're in the Denver area and into clay, I highly recommend you take an ACC class at some point. It's a terrific clay program.

And on a total tangent, I took the above photo with my cell phone and was able to beam it to my computer using wireless Bluetooth technology. Isn't that amazing? Technology is so cool (when it's working...)