December 2023

The original slabs are now ready to be glazed.  I’ve zoomed in on some of the details it’s interesting how the oxides have highlighted the texture in some area, but in others they have got a bit lost.

I like how the stains have come out with the image transfers.  This has been a successfully experiment.  I need to experiment a little with glazes so unfortunately some of this detail is likely to be lost.  I found using the stains to do this kind of image transfer a good idea and I will park this for now and revisit it at a later date.

Choosing glazes, I’ve gone for a favourite of mine and two that I haven’t used before.  In the interst of being loose and experimental – I just jmkind of splodges it on, didn’t worry about even pouring, or I brushed it over the slabs.   The glazes have their own chemistry and can affect each other where they blend or are over each other.   The also affect the oxides, and I struggle to remember if I need an earthenware or stoneware glaze to make them retain their vibrancy.

Gaps in my knowledge are the temperatures things need to be fired on – its not because I’m not told, my brain just struggles to retain the information.

I ought to say my slab making is getting better, but it’s still a struggle to getting the thickness I want whilst keeping the surface as flat and even as possible.

This time round, I decided to make textures by cutting into the slab with tools.  I used the different quarters of the slab to use various slips and stains.

The other slab with the textures, I will use to carry on with my plaster experiments.

This time I decided to use water-based oil paints on the plaster, they were a lot more vibrant than the watercolours. In fact they ended up being slightly too bright. I muted them by sanding them down and using inks over the top, mainly nut brown.

I also used a sponge and dabbed the oil paint over other parts of the tile, unless it had pva glue under it wiped of really easily. They may seem like obvious points to a lot of established ceramicists but the point is I need to be able to say why I won’t be using these techniques and what I have found by doing things in a slightly crazy order.

Looking at this I will probably remove the plaster area and take this back to the original glaze tile, because I liked the way the oxides and textures worked together.

This is something I did last year. I would like to reproduce this loose feel using clay slips and oxides. I think this image is definitely what is becoming known as my style and what I enjoy recreating.

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.

4th October 2023

I want to use my own photographs, to create images. By that, I want to experiment with ways of transferring images onto different surfaces and paint over them with different mediums. I started by taking two sheets of paper, one glossy printer paper that had an image on it already and a blank piece of sketchbook paper. I then painted white slip on them and let it dry.

The watercolour paints were very vibrant on the plaster, although I had to do a few applications as the paint soaked into the plaster.

This has got me thinking about texture and I do like the natural ridges that have occurred in the plaster pieces. I probably won’t use clay slip on paper, it’s not quite what I am looking for as a finish. Although this early in the year I’m not really sure what I’m looking for.

28th September 2023

I enjoyed today. We developed our film photographs. It was a good experience learning about the exposure unit and how to test the time needed to get the right exposure, and how to enlarge the image.

Follow the instructions on the cards, and fingers crossed it should all work.

I loved this image, and I would have liked it to have been the one the rest of the team chose to be enlarged and put on the wall as our final image. It hasn’t been.

I really feel like I’ve stepped back into some dystopian novel the way the tracks appear from nowhere and go nowhere. The train is just abandoned on the beach.