Shambling Towards Perfection

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 temperat...

So apparently the theme of this session is plates. I didn't mean for that initially, but it's turned out to be a great platform for all these different decoration techniques. On Saturday, I got a dragon egg and two plates smoothed and ready to be decorated. These are all made with 412/stoney white cone 10 clay. The dragon egg I'll be decorating tonight via the surface erosion technique , where you paint on a resist and then sponge away material, leaving the painted parts raised above the rest of the surface. I'll be using an acrylic medium, not shellac like in that link, as I won't be doing anything nearly that complicated. The plates though I was actually able to decorate on Saturday. For the first, I used an embossing tool to trace a design of Betty White. I'm hoping it looks like her, anyway. I'll use an oxide wash that's wiped off to highlight the carved in design. For the second plate, I used the " mocha diffusion " technique wh...