Clay /12

I'm back with a huge hoard of clay goodness to share! Over the last few months I've been busy making to fill up a kiln load for firing.  After the first fire it's then a busy couple of days painting all the pieces for the second firing - the exciting glaze fire! In this post I'm going to include a bunch of the pieces at their bisque stage for you to see because I personally love seeing progress shots!

Still loving terracotta!

I really dig the glaze on these guys!

I kept this bowl super simple + natural with just some white slip at the base that I scratched into.

I saw a trick online about making pendants using a syringe which I had to give a go

After months and months I have finally finished Tilikum! So proud that I saw this to completion.  I had an idea in my head right from the start and it turned out exactly as I envisioned (which is rare!).  If you don't know the story or haven't' seen Black Fish, it's a really tragic tale about an orca kept in captivity.  The documentary is definitely worth watching and hopefully my piece makes a little more sense afterwards!

More white slip fun and polka dots!

Another shot of tilikum

Lots and lots of terracotta test tiles

and some glaze testing

Some more fun using the interglaze which you put in between two different glaze types to hopefully get some funky results

I made myself a little paint palette.  
Previously, I was using a cheapo plastic one but a clay version is so much nicer!

A cross inspired by my love of all those beautiful ceramic pieces at the cemetery.  
I realised after making this that I simply can't do those ceramics justice - lesson learned!

A new bowl for peachy which I think lasted a few days before Ben dropped it.  We have concrete floors and they are not forgiving, I dropped my iphone the other week and it instantly went black and never turned back on *sad face*

I made two balls for my tilikum sculpture because I wanted to test different colours and sizes.  I loved them so much that I ended up putting the second one on a pink poodle I made below

I really really love how it turned out

Also 100% digging the underglaze paint kept raw over the terracotta

a shot to see how it looked pre-paint

aerial just for fun!

Some little evil eye pendants

and a fat little dog :P

after the bisque stage

and you can see where I kept some of the raw terracotta showing through

A tile to test out using a little squeezy bottle filled with glaze (not as easy as I thought it would be!)

and some garden markers for my herbs

(Seeing the before photos makes me wonder if I should have painted the words white :P)

Do you have a favourite?

Mine has to be tilikum just because some much love and thought went into him :)

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Clay /8

Ben is back home which is amazing for lots of reasons including kiln firing!! Plus getting to have a lovely boyfriend again - win/win! We got to run through a bisque firing the other day (the first stage - getting the clay hard) which I'm sharing today. I then became a mad man for the next couple of days painting clay to run the second firing which I'll save for another post!)

This is what it looks like inside the kiln. We normally put in a few shelves to maximise space but we didn't have high enough props (we built too big!) so this is probably a bad example of how to stock a kiln efficiency wise!

Mermaid!

Happy Bear! 

Both the mermaid and the bear I ended up devoting lots of time to make sure they were nice and smooth

All together now!

Tilikum! Have you guys seen black fish? A little tilikum tribute piece after finding out he passed away :( :(

Bandicoot! I wanted to see if I could devote less time to a piece (skip the sanding/smoothing) and get a similar outcome once it was covered in gloss - results to come!

Baby roo! It's easy to sand a piece like this (no vulnerable parts to break off!)

A bowl of badges in the making!

Tiny Spoon

Teeny tiny bowl

Some flowers and brooches

Mumma kangaroo! She tragically broke (tail and foot) pre-firing, actually whilst I was sanding/smoothing which led to the prospect of skipping that step altogether. I'm a super clumsy/messy soul so whenever a project calls for supreme delicacy I normally don't excel :p In my defense clay (pre-bisque fired) is super fragile!!

A little Shaun tan inspired figurine.  He was holding a star and a moon (which you can see a couple of shots up) but I managed to break both off!

Test tiles! If you follow me on Instagram you would have seen these completed :) The reason to make paint test tiles is to see how the different glazes will look.

Bunny!

And a cockatoo. I actually bought this amazing cockatoo lamp shade from a garage sale the other week and then accidentally broke it when I got it home (are you seeing a trend here?). Ben suggested I make a cast of it but it turns out it was easier just to sculpt a new one then learn a new skill of casting - I'm sure there's a life lesson there.

Next blog post i'll show you how they went after being painted and fired!

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