My piece was inspired by a Claude Monet painting, which is part of a collection called "Banks of the Seine". Monet created this collection in 1878, and it depicts it's namesake, the Seine river, which runs throughout France. Monet began painting in 1858, and continued until his death in 1926. Monet was actually on of the founders of the impressionism art style, where the artist would go to the location, and paint on the spot, rather than make their art in a studio. Impressionism artists will use thin yet visible brush strokes, open composition, and have an emphasis on the accurate depiction of light, and how it would behave in reality. Monet himself attended many different art schools, however the most prominent would be Le Havre Secondary School of the Arts. Personally, I chose Claude Monet because I found both his topics and art style fascinating. I like to think that I'm an outdoors type of person, and, because Monet mostly painted landscapes of natural environments, it seemed the most relatable to me. However, I didn't want to choose an extremely popular painting, such as Monet's "Water Lilies", which is why I began looking at "Banks of the Seine". Finally for the building process, I decided to create a darted mug, which up until this point, I hadn't attempted in class. I also incorporated a small amount of coil building as well while I was making the grass. I would roll out coils, cut and flatten one side of them, and use a scoring tool to texture the other. I made layers of these coils from top to bottom, which gave the grass a kind of depth. Finally, I used a combination of different shades of green under glaze for the grass/handle, as well as different shades of blue and white under glaze for the water and the sky in the background. I didn't really run into any major problems while I was building my mug, I was just working slow, and took a little longer than I had wanted to.