Ladybug Jewelry Plate

I am currently a high schooler in Chicago, and I love to make art with my hands. Making ceramics out of clay, putting rings together made of wire and stone, or even simply drawing. The piece above is one of my dishes made out of clay named as a ladybug jewelry plate. At my school, I am privileged enough to be able to create art like my ladybug jewelry plate. I do not usually have the resources needed to make such a project, and so I am very grateful to the art program at my school for being able to create like this. I decided to create this piece because I have a love for jewelry. Earlier in my second semester, my school was having classes online and so I needed to pick a project that I could do at home. I chose wire rings. I made almost a million of them, even in my free time because it was so much fun (I even made rings while watching Reign on Netflix). I made rings out of gold, copper, silver, black, and platinum colored wire with stones ranging all over the rainbow. But all of a sudden we were back in person and covid started to reduce here in Chicago. What was I going to make now that we had our ceramics class in person? Well, what would be better than a jewelry plate for all the jewelry that I made? I started to design. At first, I wanted to create a 3D cat centerpiece out of clay that would stand in between the jewelry, but as I designed more and more sketches and ideas, I eventually came up with the design above. I chose ladybugs because I like ladybugs, it’s really that simple. I am virtually afraid of all bugs in existence (this does exclude ants, but ants are ugly, don’t @ me). Yes, this includes butterflies. While its aesthetic is beautiful and I’m in love with it, if a butterfly tries to fly near me I will be activating my fight or flight. And so now we have ladybugs, a bug that is not scary to me and kind of adorable (automatically my favorite). I also decided on pink because it is one of my favorite colors (my favorite colors are blue and pink), and pink and red are basically soulmates.

While pieces of art such as this do not necessarily need scissors all the time, I did use scissors in mine. Although it is a simple but important aspect of the creation process, I used scissors to cut the clay and sculpt the look of the plate. After getting the desired look, I waited for the plate to dry completely and painted the plate with a “just-in-case” coating of glaze as at the time I was not one hundred percent sure where I was going with the mosaic tile. Then, my wonderful ceramics teacher fired the dish in a kiln. If you are not completely informed in the process of creating a dish, we fire the product in something called a kiln so that when it comes out it can look glossy or matte with different colors, produced from the glaze (it’s like a special paint for ceramics). I then began my mosaic process. Every single piece of mosaic tile on this plate was cut by me. It was a lot of work and took a lot of time, but eventually, every single piece had been glued down. Lastly, I did the grout. Grout is a powdery substance that you mix with water and put in between the cracks of the tile (it is optional). Grout comes in many different colors and I chose to mix a pretty light pink to match the color of the background tile. Once the grout dried, I had to scrape it off from the top of every tile to get the finished product.

This piece took around 4 hours a week for 2 months and I am extremely happy with the outcome of this project. I hope that if you see my piece, you feel inspired to create something of your own. One last thing I want to mention is that if you’re in the middle of creating something and you feel like it’s terrible or you’re just wasting your time, a valuable lesson I’ve learned is to just keep working on it. It sounds corny I know, but art is all about the process and not just the beginning and end. Your piece, whatever media it is, might look trashy in the middle, that’s just how art is, but if you keep progressing and making an effort, the end product will be all worth it. Art also teaches you so much about creating. I can definitely say that I learned a lot about the mosaic process making this dish, so I hope you all can try something artistic that you have never done before.