Shambling Towards Perfection

During the week I got my dragon egg for saggar mostly finished. It's made around wadded up newspaper as per the "clay potato" technique, plus I did go ahead add two chunks of clay inside the paper so they'll rattle around inside the egg after it's finished, suggesting something's inside. Here it is after I added the first vein, as an experiment: I was pleased with how it looked, so I added 2 more veins. During Saturday's class I finished smoothing the egg's surface out as much as possible, shaped it a bit more, and added a crack so it would look like the egg's inhabitant was attempting to escape. That also conveniently made a nice big opening for expanding air to escape from during firing. I also smushed the veiny bits by paddling them, following a suggestion from my teacher. It makes the veins look a bit more a part of the egg, in my opinion, so I'm quite happy with the effect. Overall I think it turned out pretty well: Saggar fir...

The second class of the session has come and gone. Our teacher always uses the second class to teach the newbies how to throw, so I listened hard and attempted to follow along. I managed to turn out two specimens of roundness: a bowl and a cylinder, again using half-and-half I had leftover. I'll have to break into some of my other clay leftovers at some point, I think; I'd forgotten that if you're actually successfully throwing stuff you can go through clay much more quickly than with hand-building (well, at least with my rather perfectionist standards of hand-building). So hey, maybe I can use up my vast stock of leftovers. Wouldn't that be something! Anyway, I had actually attempted to make two cylinders, but as our teacher always says, "bowls happen". It's pretty easy to make a bowl, but keeping the sides straight and making a cylinder is much more difficult, which is why our teacher has us aim for cylinders at first. The bowl did indeed happen first,...