Ceramic shape studies

Some of the earliest artifacts left by man have been clay pots. They mark the beginning of civilization and stand as a testament to man's constant quest for industry and technology. As such I thought that this would be a good exercise, not so much for turning shapes as these are all fairly elemental but, more for extracting shells with determined wall thicknesses for the purpose of manufacturing. I also wanted to explore the use of gray scaled photographs as alpha masks through which I could extract mesh and raise the brick and weathered wood textures in order to contrast the smoothness of the ceramic. Further experiments with deformations led to near hallucinatory variants.