Wet Clay: Finished

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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.

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