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Category Archives: Technique
Elizabeth Harris Nichols: from anteater to salmon eater
The sculpture on the left is the first thing I saw at the studio yesterday and I kidded Elizabeth, its maker, about sculpting anteaters now (anteaters are funny, right?). Over the course of the afternoon, Elizabeth turned the anteater into a bear eating a salmon and, at the same time, she threw a series of [...]
The Way to Wacky Bottles
This bottle design came into being while I was giving a handbuilding demo in my Wednesday afternoon class. I had visualized a bottle made of two shallow, textured, circular bowl shapes put together to form the body of the bottle, but I neglected to visualize how the bottle stand up. When I rested it on [...]
Sandi Piernatozzi wants us to try something different
In the DVD set What If? Explorations with Texture and Soft Slabs, Sandi Piernatozzi’s demonstrates how working with soft slabs can open up infinite possibilities in both shape and texture. As beginners we were taught to make a cylinder by forming a slab around a vertical form (and don’t forget to cover the form with [...]
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Screen Printing on Clay
In Screen Printing on Clay, Paul Andrew Wandless starts at the beginning by showing us, step-by-step, how to make a small silkscreen out of a picture frame. He then goes on to show how to using drawing fluid and screen block (similar to wax resist technique) to apply images to the screen. He also creates [...]
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Templates, textures, teacups
Still working with very thin slabs, this time making bowls and teacups. I started by cutting out a template from newspaper and once I had a working template, I cut a more permanent one out of cardboard (in this case, bright blue). To make a low bowl like the one on the right, I started [...]
Slabs, textures, buttons: I saw it on my TV!
My daughter-in-law loves the bluish mug on the right and I know this because she wrote me a note saying that if she had made a mug like this she would write a blog post about it, so that’s what I’m doing. This is a new design for me (I usually throw my mugs) and [...]
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Multi-Media
My version of multi-media is clay combined with crocheting—in this case a pinch pot smoothed and burnished on the outside with raku glaze on the inside. Holes punched when the pot was leather hard. Collar crocheted on, shells and shell fragments added. This was the first one I made and now I can’t stop. Crocheting [...]
Bathroom Sink
When you buy a sink at the hardware store it comes with a paper template to guide you when you cut the hole in the counter. I liked the shiny new sink but I liked the paper template more because it is a perfect oval and I used it to make a cardboard mould for [...]
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Horse Hair
On a clear cold Saturday morning I put a burnished porcelain plate without glaze on it into a kiln until it was very hot and I used tongs to pull it out of the kiln and set it on a piece of kiln shelf on the ground outside. As the plate pinged in the cold [...]
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I’m following the pattern, but I know not where