STACKED PIGMENTED PORCELAIN
CERAMICS II
porcelain clay, oxides & glazes
This is such a fun assignment but challenging.
That's why I save it for my second year clay kids.
They are required to mix up at least one color of clay using porcelain and oxides.
One of the challenges is to pour enough of the oxide colorant into the porcelain so that it changes the white into a color.
It's really hard to know how much to use.
When I do it for myself I do it by eye.
Above and below we see senior Nicholas Tudor's attempt.
He choose cobalt carbonate,
but sadly after all this work with his design,
which looks so very cool...
we were hardly able to see the results.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the pix of his finished piece.
But I do have senior Yasmeen Pardo's mug below.
She had the same problem as Nick,
not being able to see the end results after all that work.
Senior Erin Hsiao went for it and poured a lot more into her white porcelain,
wedged it up,
then alternated it with the straight white,
and as you can see below it really showed up nicely in her very interesting sculptural form.
And senior Ju Eun Lee,
who also used cobalt,
simply stopped her wedging before it turned into a solid color,
and actually got a really nice marbled effect with several values.
So this is how we will probably do it next year.
Let me know what you think!
There is so much in creating that is unknown. What is enough or too much ... be it texture, color, embellishment, whatever.
ReplyDeleteSo it is that sometimes less is more ... as Ju Eun Lee's results clearly show. Knowing when to stop is a good thing.
And yet ... the camera is perennially challenging when it comes to subtle color. I suspect that the lighter pieces have a magic all their own that only a personal visit would reveal.