Art is one of the many career pathways the high school offers courses for. Students are given the opportunity to express themselves through painting or sculpting.
“I enjoy being able to make physical sculptures,” Hayden Schaffer, Arts and Comm. junior, said. “We had to do a project about lanterns, but I made a giant dragon instead. It is definitely being able to be so creative and have a huge heavy piece that you can show off to people later.”
There is also a pottery art class students can take involving sculpting pottery projects through moulding clay materials.
“It was really nice,” Alex Bonilla, Arts and Comm. junior, said. “I liked working with the clay and making various things with my hands.”
Ceramics I, the official title of the high school class, is the pottery classes taught by Hahn.
“If you need an arts credit, you should definitely take it,” Bonilla said. “She is very lenient on projects, so you can make whatever you want.”
The class primarily focuses on how students can manipulate clay through techniques like pinching, coiling and slabbing.
“We go through our hand-building techniques and then we work through all those with different projects,” Hahn said. “I am just focusing on the hand building, kind of getting used to clay because a lot of kids have not had clay for a while,”
On an occasional basis, students can also create clay projects using the throwing wheel, a motorized tool used to efficiently shape clay.
“I have seven throwing wheels,” Hahn said. “So I will take groups of seven kids, and we will throw on the wheels for about a week, and then the rest of the class is working on a separate project.”
Students also learn to glaze their projects, a decorative coating added to give the student’s project a glossy texture and color.
“We learned how to glaze stuff, how to glaze it properly and we got to learn how to combine glazes to make new colors,” Schaffer said.
The pottery class is known to be small in numbers, but the class has been gradually increasing in numbers. Hahn is now working with more classes throughout the semester.
“I went from having one, maybe two classes to two to three classes a semester,” Hahn said.
Pottery is a unique art experience, requiring hands-on work and messy materials to create projects. Through the class, students can uniquely experience pottery for themselves and potentially gain new profound love for artistry.
“If you have space in your schedule and you need to take an arts credit, I would say try it out,” Schaffer said. “It is better to try it and hate it than to not try it at all and lose out on a chance to find something that you love.”
