Pottery: Another Escape from Painting [pics + videos]

For placing in last year's Chalk Walk, I won a class from our local art museum and of course I enrolled in pottery! I made some of my most favorite pieces yet! It's been a pretty tumultuous time in my career (also hence the lack of Steemit posts) so it was so wonderful to be able to take a break from painting but still stay in the creative groove.

I had made a previous post about ten months ago regarding the last pottery class that I took a what I learned from it. You can find it here.

I started with hand-building because I've been curious how my typical 2D-working brain would translate into 3D and all the wheel were currently in use. I began painting portraits when I first started painting and am most comfortable with them so I thought I'd go for sculpting a head.

I was also recently inspired by Polynesian design. I used that inspiration for my work in this 8-week session class. I used a technique called sgraffito which involves painting slip and carving into it to reveal the clay body underneath. It's sooo much fun.

Post-fire

After this step, I brushed on clear glaze and it went back out of the kiln nice and shiny. It's hollowed out to be used as a utensil holder.

I had fun with hand-building, but it didn't beat the therapy that the focus of throwing on the wheel provided. I spent my last several sessions spinning some mud!

There's always a learning curve approaching the wheel again, so I certainly expected mistakes. BUT one of my favorite things about mistakes is that sometimes they simply provide another means to an end. One of my bowls, for example, collapsed because of an uneven wall structure and ended up being pretty neat and unique anyway!

I did some experimenting with timelapse too! Here's a short video clip of some throwing.

Once my pots are leather hard, they're ready to be trimmed. For this step, I'm trying to even the clay walls and make the bottoms look nice with some feet.

I threw ten pots and continued with the sgraffito Polynesian theme. Here they are prefired.

And pre-fire after they were carved...!

Post first fire. The must be fired first before glazing, we fire at cone 4. I clear glazed the outsize and the inside black.

And post fire! I'll be back at the studio making more hopefully next week!

So much has changed since my last post that I will be writing about. I now have a studio space at an awesome downtown location as a resident artist and have participated in several really cool shows I'm excited to share. I also have a large commission I've been working on, progressing in my portfolio work, and readying for a big art festival at the beginning of May! Coming soon!

Thanks for looking!

www.christiesnelson.com