One Week Left!

One week until the assessment! Panic time!!! Have been throwing lots of bowls and am finding it very satisfying that I am getting quicker.

I am glazing the bowls with my own glazes, working with my own drawings in a similar way to the coasters. This time however I am trying to plan the designs more.

These are designs that went into the kiln on Friday, I will have to wait until Monday to see how they will come out. I did do a few testers last week, which I think are really successful. 

I had a few problems with getting the transfers to stick, part of the smallest one has not stuck. I will have to be more careful with the next ones to make sure this doesn't happen again. 

I have a lot to do next week!

Transfer Work

As practices for my final piece I have produced a number of coasters which use my glazes along with transfers of my own ink drawings. Some were more successful than others but I am able to use these as a basis for how to decorate my final designs. 

My piece in Plymouth Museum!

February

Most importantly this month I have got a piece into Plymouth Museum, which is a great opportunity. They commissioned my course to create a piece in response to their collections and I chose to focus on their Chinese Porcelain collections. The piece I came up with is a 3D representation of a picture painted onto one of their plates. Their pieces lacked perspective and proportion and this is something that I wanted to show by doing the opposite - making it in 3D. 

I have also got the rest of my nests in the college gallery in Plymouth town centre. 

This month our Final Major Project has been launched, and I am again focusing on functional ware, but also how glazes could be used in a contemporary way on them. I have started by going out on lots of walks and visits with my camera searching for texture and pattern inspiration, here are some of my favourite photos:

My job now is to find ways to use my glazes to recreate some of these patterns on my ceramic pieces. I am greatly looking forward to seeing what happens!

End of 2011

On the 26th November PCA held a Christmas Craft Fair and myself, Jane and Ruth shared a table at the fair. I sold a few pieces and it was a great experience as I got to practice talking to potential buyers and learn how to run a stand.

My pieces

Jane's pieces

 Ruth's pieces

 For my technical research module I am exploring into glazes and some brief chemistry behind them. These are some of the examples of the glazes I have produced.

 This piece has crawled (the glaze has shrunk more than the pot). Remedies for this could be - cleaning the pot before glazing as it could of collected dust, adding more water to the glaze or developing the glaze ingredients to make it less dry.

 A number of these pieces crawled, and I believe this is partially because of the base glaze I used not being suitable to withstand extra oxide additions, and partially because I have applied it too thickly. I could water down the glaze and try again on another pot.