These animal sculptures were my favorite pieces to date, I made the manta ray for myself and the pink cat for my little sister for Christmas.
The biggest problem I ran into with the manta ray was spending so much time creating intricate white details along its back only for the clay to be white and all the details to blend in after it was fired. This made me feel very stupid for wasting my time but all I can do is laugh about it now. If I were to redo the manta ray I would carve the designs using a needle tool into the back instead of trying to use white under-glaze since that did not work. I finished the piece by glazing it with koi pond glaze all over and I like how it turned out.
Surprisingly the cat was very easy to make, I had to look at a lot of reference pictures of cats sitting down to get the side profile to look okay but after it was done and glaze it looked great. The only thing I would do differently with it is to carve the facial features a little deeper since the glaze kind of covered them but other than that I'm really happy with how it turned out.