8th November 2023

I have it in my mind that I somehow want to use clay as my canvas and create art on it. A way of combining my love of working with clay and painting. My usual work with ceramics is either modelling lumps of clay or roll pots and vases of varying sizes and decorating with slips and glazes. I want to take this further and create something a bit unique and unusual art.

My rolling out skills are not great, everyone says it’s just like pastry and baking etc. The problem here is I don’t bake and if I need pastry I tend to cheat and buy it ready made/rolled. So I have two long thing pieces of clay, but I want to create a square slab. This is where I learnt a new skill, joining the two slabs together and cutting straight edges and adding to the corners until I had the shape I needed.

Once the slab was rolled out and reasonably evenly square, I used white slip and porcelain slip in different areas to get different shades of white/cream and used embossed wallpaper to press into the wet clay. I aslo sprinkled on different textured grit/sand so that some areas were smooth and others you could feel the raised textures.

Whilst this was drying off, it was back to the plaster and sanding it down to see how the water colour paint had soaked into the plaster, if it blended well, how deep it went etc. I think it had a nicer effect after I sanded it, the colours blended into each other better. I found when I was painting the plaster that because it soaked up the wet it didn’t give me the opportunity to manipulate the paint and direct where I wanted it to go. It felt very streaky and in solid blocks.

I also made another slab. Unfortunately the clay had a number of air bubbles in it and this caused lots of long holes, so it had to be wedged so that I could use it again. The upside to it being wedged is that instead of being a rectangle it could be flattened and rolled out as a square, well an almost square. I still had to trim the edges and corners to straighten it off.