Wet Clay: Finished

-
Yeah I couldn't think of a witty title today. But anyway. Tuesday was the last day for wet clay, and also our first raku firing. So first, I had to glaze the mushroom and oval box.

I decided to save the fairy hut for tomorrow, when we'll be doing naked raku. I used some bright red underglaze on the top of the mushroom, plus turquoise crackle, tomat's red (I think), and copper luster. Anyway I was trying to go for a pretty brightly colored, contrasting top. I put white crackle on the stem, and then also a few dots of alligator rust on both the top and stem to make it look a bit warty. I forgot to get a picture after that was glazed.

For the box, I did black glaze on the zigzags on the bottom, turquoise crackle on the flat part of the top, and glass red on the knob.

Both pieces came out great, although I did have 2 small cracks in the mushroom's top. One of the instructors had a piece that cracked, too, and she builds stuff like woah, so I wonder if the temperature issues we had (the raku kiln kept blowing out: 4 times, I believe) contributed to that. But the cracks are no big deal and I can fill them with something if they bug me. I do need to get the mushroom cleaned up; it went top down into the paper, so it's covered in burnt bits. What we could see of it looked like it got some great colors and crackle. The box got some really great color, too; the turquoise is gorgeous and the glass red went almost pinkish. The black-on-black turned out great, too.

Other than the excitement of raku, I also finished off a final plate, which I'll be decorating with bubble-glazing. It's just totally plain with no decoration so far.

And then I spent quite a lot of time working on the dragon egg. I did "surface erosion" where I painted matte medium on the egg and then wiped away at the unpainted parts so they're lower. I just did swirly designs all over. The first picture shows after painting, before eroding. The others show after using the sponge to erode the unpainted bits.


It was an interesting technique, and fairly easy to do. I did mess up a bit in one part where I didn't have quite enough wax resist painted on, so some clay came off in an uneven way. The one bad thing is that I used stoney white, which is rather gritty, so after wiping away it became quite uneven with bigger bits of sand sticking out. Hopefully after glazing that won't be so apparent. We'll see tomorrow, I guess. I could have fixed this a couple of ways, by using a tool to burnish it and basically make the sand stick back in, or by painting slip on the exposed areas, but both of those would be time-consuming and it was quite late already, and I didn't wanna. So I didn't. ;) In the future I'll just remember if I'm eroding, it needs to be a smoother clay body. 1/2 and 1/2 or something would probably be much nicer. Or the raku clay, which is amazingly smooth (with the box, our instructor asked if I'd burnished the sides; that's how smooth they were. I totally didn't).

Alas, I did not have time for making salt n pepper shakers. I might roll out some clay tomorrow and take it home so I could make some at home before the next session, but we'll see... I don't know how ambitious I'll be feeling after all this. The summer session is always quite intense.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Git. The WHAT and WHY Edition.

-
Image
Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a
Read more

"Does it get easier?" Yes, but Also No...

-
Image
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay It's complicated... "Does it get easier?" I see some form of this question asked a lot in beginner programming groups. I always struggle with how to answer this honestly and clearly, because the truth is not that simple. In some ways it does get easier, but in other ways it is almost always going to be difficult if you are advancing in your career . If you are a programmer and your job is easy for years on end, the most likely explanation is that you're in the kind of dead-end position that people try to avoid, not the kind of position people dream about when they think of becoming a developer. Most likely you are not getting better at being a dev, not working with new tech or solving new kinds of problems, not being given more responsibility, etc. etc. etc. I've seen some pushback from other newbie programmers on the idea that it could remain difficult past the initial learning stage. Notably I have never once seen somebody who
Read more

How to Land Your First Dev Job: Develop Yourself, Market Yourself

-
Image
Image by magnetme from Pixabay In the coding and tech groups I'm in, I see the same question asked over and over by folks who are just learning to code, finishing up a bootcamp, degree, or other training program, or who have been looking for that first job for awhile and not having any luck: "what do I need to do to get my first dev job?" There's a whole ton of info out there on this topic, but it's scattered all over, so I thought I would gather together the best resources I've come across and share them, along with a bit of context, to try and help everybody struggling with or just plain wondering about this. There are a lot  of things you can do to improve your chances of finding a job and hopefully shorten your job search. They are broadly divided into 2 categories: developing yourself and your skills, and marketing yourself and your skills. Note that you don't need to do everything on this list, nor do you need to do it all at once. This is an "
Read more