I wanna make small sqaure pieces too!

I love love love the small multi-media paintings Erin has been working on! I want to make some little square pieces too! Plus, I really enjoyed making those tiles for BayArts' fundraiser earlier this summer...

Can you guess what it'll be?

Bingo!

I've been dying to try this... An artist at the Cain Park Art Fair said she used cake decorating tips and bags to apply slip.

I used a writing tip to lay down stems and leaves...

Then I kind of flattened them down with my finger to help them "stick" and make them look leafy.

Hmm... Needs more fish. I hope the slip doesn't flake off as the piece dries. I have it covered really tightly, so hopefully moisture content will even out between the plate and the slip.

So is it a tile or is it a plate? Yes.

Adventures in glazing

I'm glazing in my kitchen again... Here's the latest cream and sugar

The dot placement is based on a knitting pattern... This is a "three color fabric pattern" (and a detail of a placemat I made a few years ago). The pattern can be found in Barbara Walker's "Treasury of Knitting Patterns vol 1," if anyone's interested.

Gotta wax the turtles' little feet!

Here's the big fish bowl, ready to go! Clear glaze overlaps Turkish Amber about halfway down. I'm hoping to get a nice gradient (and not wicked glaze drips!)

Bones on Sunlight

I just realized I forgot to post these paintings from last week:

Fox Skull and Daliahs

Butterfly with Antique lace print.

Fish skeleton and begonias. All fish bones were painstakingly cut out by hand with an x-acto knife. The cream color of the skeleton is the natural color of the wood beneath.

The blue paper is a wonderful call back to my childhood - Sunprint paper! My mom used to make these amazing prints with me when I was little and I thought they would be perfect for the show. They use a simple photographic process to harness the UV rays of the sun to make a print.

First you lay out your design on the paper (which starts out light blue):

Then you expose it to the sun for 2 minutes or until the paper turns white and the silhouettes turn blue underneath:

Afterward, you stick the paper in a tray of water and lemon juice. When the paper is dry, it will be a dark blue and the silhouettes will be white. The paper in this photo is the one used in the butterfly painting:

Thanks MOM for such creative projects way back when and HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!! Love you!

Big fish bowl, continued...

Last night I finally finished painting the big bowl. Near the end I was so sleepy I was seeing double.

How many fish am I holding up?
...Too many to tell...
Sssnnnoooorrre...

The summer of the rabbit

We have bunnies in downtown Cleveland! No one in my office remembers seeing any in previous years.

Here's the view from my office window...

And if you look straight down in the mulch bed: a bunny! Oh, I do love the bunnies. Today's bunny index is 2, but I've counted as many as 5.

Anyway... I'm nearly finished with another birdbath.

This one features frogs. Here's the beginning of one.

Almost done!

I'll start glazing the other three this weekend.

Rabbits in the Grass

Newest Painting - Oil on gessoed board.

The bitter with the batter

First, the good news:

The small fish bowls and fish cups turned out really well!

Good job, me!

The bottoms are nice too.


And now, the bad news:

The dotted dessert plates aren't so good: the white glaze let me down. The plates fired to temperature and the glaze matured, but it looks more like white paint than the "Snowflake" I know and love.

I'm going to try firing them again. The big question is: should I add a shiny glaze on top of the white to help it flux, or should I just re-fire the plates as they are? I will have to consult the kiln oracle.