Ceramics Two Week Block pt. 2

It's 11pm Tuesday night and I'm still so excited by what we did today! We had our 1st Raku firing!

Raku is an ancient Japanese pottery technique where the bisque fired piece is dipped into a layer of resist, fired again, then removed from the hot kiln and placed (straight out of the kiln) into a container filled with combustible material such a sawdust/shavings. This causes cracks, dots, spots of carbonization where the smoke penetrates the layer of resist, and where there is no resist. I really love the element of suprise involved because you can't be sure where the cracks will appear and have no real control of how the finished piece will look. But I suppose the same can be said of all ceramics, you can never really be sure whats going to happen once you put something into the kiln!

Here are about half of the pieces that I prepared for Raku. They are vessels, they are smooth and quite skinny and were dipped into resist at either end, so they should have some really intresting carbonization in the middles.

Here is the inside of the kiln when it was at about 700C!!! You can see some of the vessels are glowing a bright orange. It was so hot when Keiran took out the bung (isn't that a brilliant word?!) for us to look but we all crowded round and got pictures anyway!

Here is the kiln being opened, with Elaine waiting to grab the pieces and put them into the bins of sawdust we had waiting.

Here are the two bins full of pieces and sawdust, just smoking away!

 We had a sneaky look in one of the bins to see what was going on inside, look at those amazing colours! I almost wish that metallic sheen has stayed on them.

 This is one of my larger vessels just out of the kiln and about to be dunked in the bucket of water on the ground.

 There it is having a nice chillax in a bucket of water to cool down for itself.

 Here it is out of the water and with most of the resist scraped(sp?) off.

I love the way my camera decided that my boot was obviously what needed to be perfectly in focus in the picture! 

And lastly we have all the beautiful shards of resist that were scraped(sp?!) off the vessels. These are almost as beautiful as the actual pieces we made!

I'm so proud of my first Raku vessel and I can't wait to see how the rest of them have turned out!

Ceramics Pt.3 coming on Thursday night!

Ceramics Two Week Block

So I've been in ceramics for the past week, and so far it's been really intresting and enjoyable.
Unfortunatly I've been a bit ill (with the mankiest, most painful infected mouth ulcer in the world EVER) so I don't feel I've been giving my fullest but hopefully with the aid of anti-biotics this second week will be even better!
Here is a picture of my sponge. His name is Bob. He doesn't like to be used for 'mark-making' and screams when I try to do so.

This is a suprise.

And here is Catherina, looking a little nervous about throwing her first bowl!

I will try to post something longer/better next week, when I'm feeling better and have plenty of work to show off!

Assessments!

My assessment is tomorrow so I thought I better post something so heres a picture of one of my ceramic faces. I had a chat with Keiran about what to do with the glazes for the faces and although I had already glazed this with a clear glaze it hadn't yet been fired so we decided to experiment (after all isn't that what this year is about?!) so we diped it in a beautiful blue glaze and it came out amazingly! The clear glaze is very crackled and the blue is kind of ....rough? But I think it looks pretty good :) So I have to go now and get a good nights sleep so I'm all ready for tomorrow!

And for some reason it keeps uploading this sideways.... I don't know why so I can't fix it. Just turn your head sideways to look at it!

More Stuff

Few more bits from my studio work.

I've been doing a bit of print the last couple of weeks, some monoprints and some etchings.
Here's a mono with some tracing paper over it with writing etc.

And here is a small watercolour I decided to do because ....well because I felt like it.

Thats it for now, I've loads more work done but this blogger thing is bloody annoying and theres a good film on. 

Two posts in one day!

Aren't you the lucky one?!


I forgot to post a link to my pinterest, it's an online pinboard when you 'pin' images from around the internet onto boards to share with others. I get alot of my contextual and inspirational images from pinterest which is why I sometimes don't have the artists name attached to each picture.
http://pinterest.com/mugugey/
If I haven't posted here for a few days its possibly because I am addicted to pinning!

So here they are then...

...the pictures I promised the other day! I finally remembered to put them onto my laptop from my camera and sort them out and resize them etc.

So first we have dolly with her thoughts all exploding out of her head and next to her is see-through dolly. I have been working with the first doll quite alot as inspiration really. And the second doll now has mirror stuck to the back of her and she looks like an opal, I like the idea that you can almost see your reflection through the back of her head.

Next I think is the inside and outside of one of the ceramic faces I've been making. I've been using the Body Double cast I made back in Feb and the plaster face I made from that to mould the ceramic clay, then I let it dry a little, tidy it up, then leave it over to be fired. I plan on making quite a number of these so that I can smash some, glaze some, add other materials to some and generally 'play' around with them to see where they lead me to.

I have also been using this absolutely disgusting dental silicone to try to make quick casts of my face. I have to use the dental silicone because the body double takes too long to set and when you're covering your mouth and nose in the stuff you knid of want it to set as fast as possible! Here is a mould I made of a dolls head just so you can see what the silicone looks like. So the image on the left is the mould cut open and the image on the right is dolly stuck in a cup. 

This silicone dries out and disintegrates very quickly (within days) so if you use it to make a mould you will be lucky to get just one cast out of it. But it is very handy for doing things quickly.



Ok so the next picture is of one of the mouths I managed to cast from ceramic clay using the dental silicone mould I had made, and it was the last thing I got out of that mould so they are gone in the bin now and I'll have to make some more. I'm really really pleased with how this mouth came out and I can't wait to fire and glaze it. I'm hoping to be able to make the teeth really shiny and white and the lips a matte pinkyred.

So I'm going to leave you now with one last image. Which is of a doll that I spotted as I left college this evening, she was having a lie down under a tree. Not the kind of place I would choose for a lie down but there you go.

Busy busy stress stress

I've been a bit too busy recently to update my blog, but I have some images of studio work and stuff that I'll upload as soon as I remember to take copy them from my camera to my laptop to my memory stick to this computer. We had our first progress review last week and I'm quite pleased with how it went, I know I have things to work on but I feel more relaxed now knowing that my tutors seem to understand where I'm going and what I'm doing. So I have time now to concentrate on doing my CCS essay.... not so much fun. I'm finding it really difficult to even get started but I know I need to get on top of it and not let it get away from me like I have done in the past. Anyway I better get back to my studio now and stop avoiding my desk.