I have already done quite many experiments for my research, this time I decided to activate another childhood memory and do something with play-doh. I had many ideas on how to approach this topic, since it makes certain playing aspects possible, so I’m sure that it would’ve been nice to also use some other tools than just plain play-doh. In the future, I would definitely try to also include using some stencils to make the whole object more patterned in the end. To add to that, it would’ve worked well to combine some of the colours and really mix them so that the different colours mix at some points and some others show up in streaks in the patterns, of course this method can only be done once, since the colours will then be mixed together and cannot fully be taken apart anymore. However, I think that in this case it would work out well to just form some abstract shapes with it and then use this type of structure for future projects.
The play-doh I used was of lesser quality, therefore it tended to stick to the hands more than it did other things. It was really hard to form and I think it would’ve also been harder to mix. When I started the process I already wanted to get it off my hands, because it was really uncomfortable to work with. Since this was still my experiment and I had to make at least something out of it, I decided to work on two simpler shapes that I had done before in some of my other experiments. The watermelon and the pomegranate. I only had little play-doh, so I had to make them quite small, which was fine, since this experiment was just supposed to get me started and help me try out different materials. To start, I chose the colours that matched best with the result I was going for, started to make the play-doh smoother by rolling it in my hands for a bit and then decided on doing simple shapes to just show the fruits for what they are. The pomegranate was just made out of red play-doh in two pieces, a ‘crown-like’ piece for the top and the round body of the fruit. The watermelon was done by using, emerald, black and pink play-doh and creating a watermelon slice, by making its distinct shape in a pink moon-like shape, the outer part in a similar shape but much thinner in emerald and the seeds in black. First I wanted to add just three seeds, but I decided it would look better with five seeds.
In the following pictures you can see my final outcome. Again I chose to stay with the same topic as all of my other blogposts, so the pomegranate stands for Iranian culture, while the watermelon stands for Palestinian culture.
