Ceramic bowls

In the ceramics workshop that I am participating in every Thursday afternoon at Signal Arts Centre (near where I live), I decided I wanted to make a few handbuilt bowls using slab and flat coil techniques. 

I used pudding bowls as formers, lined first with cling film to ease removal of the bowls when finished. With flat coil technique, one simply rolls coils and presses them into areas left after placing flat clay slabs onto the former. The slabs and coils are joined by working on the inside - pressing the joins together and smoothing. I used terracotta clay for this bowl, with a coil foot.

I made four bowls in a smaller pudding bowl with grey clay and rolled balls for their feet. This is how they look bisqued. The cracks on the outside are intentional: they show where the slab pieces have joined; these joining areas are smoothed together on the inside of the bowl. As the feet, whether ball or coil, are attached when the bowl is leather hard and removed from the former, they must be attached using slip and roughing up the surface, as with any other handbuilt pot. I like to use a bit of vinegar too, which is a strong adhesive for clay.

This is the terracotta bowl when it came out of the bisque fire.

I glazed the four grey bowls with a black glaze all over, but I wiped the glaze from the outside with a damp sponge such that the glaze remained in the surface cracks. I then spattered white glaze on the inside of the bowls. Here are the four "galaxy" bowls sitting happily on their kiln shelf prior to the final firing.

The course facilitator had picked up a new glaze - gold! I painted black glaze on the entire terracotta pot (except the foot of course), wiping the coil areas with a damp sponge before applying the gold glaze.

The gold glaze was very liquid so I applied it by carefully trailing the glaze on the slightly raised areas of the coil swirls. As with the four smaller bowls, sponging the black glaze off the coil areas, left some glaze in the deeper cracks.

Though difficult to photograph, I was delighted with the results. The black glaze actually has a bluish tinge, and the gold is a gorgeous glaze!

I was also delighted with my "galaxy" bowls. The wiped glaze technique worked perfectly for the outside of the bowls, and the results of the spattered white glaze on the inside were just as I had hoped. In ceramics the best plans can easily go astray in the kiln, so it is never until the last firing that one knows for sure whether a pot has worked or not!

Hand-painted ceramic tiles

Towards the end of last year I came across a box of white ceramic tiles, leftover from tiling the bath/shower area a few years ago. There were 30-40 square tiles in the box, and I wondered if I could make use of them in my weekly ceramics workshop.

First a test tile had to be made so that I could see how the available glazes reacted with the pre-glazed tiles. I was pleased with the result and thought I could proceed with the idea of doing paintings and/or
drawings on the available tiles.

A chart corresponding to the glazes used on the tile test is a necessary and invaluable tool! The available glazes are numbered mostly with Roman numerals, and I left out glazes that I definitely would not be using for this project (e.g., white and clear glazes).

I dug out some of my sketchbooks that had floral drawings and focused on images that I wanted to reproduce on the tiles and re-sketched them to the tile size. I also made a small chart so that the watercolour pencils I was using corresponded with the glaze test tile.

I used this sketch as a model for the finished tile that is the first image above.

I decided to do five testers to see how painting the glazes on tiles would work. It was a meticulous task, as the glazes are being painted on a glossy, smooth pre-glazed tile.

This is an image of four of the completed tiles in the kiln before firing. The fifth tile is on another shelf.

These are the same four tiles, still in the kiln, after the firing. I am pleased with the results and now can confidently do more of these paintings with the other tiles in the box!

Ceramic workshop

As previously mentioned, I have been participating in a ceramics workshop at Signal Arts Centre. The workshops are held in periods of six weeks, and during the second round of workshops I was working on the book covers but also brushing up on the coil hand-building technique. I decided to make a set of four round coasters and since I had a bag of coloured glass blobs, I thought I would incorporate them into the design.

After making the coil coasters I scooped out their centres creating a divet to hold a glass blob each. I decided on the colours: blue, red, mauve and yellow. I glazed each coaster with "burnt sugar" glaze, which I then used a damp sponge to wipe. The red and the blue blobs melted perfectly on their coasters, but the mauve seemed harder to melt and has a cracked glass appearance. I imagine that the yellow blob must have reacted to the glaze as it appears more red (it is the one at the top) and it didn't melt evenly. 

I also made a coil cylinder, most likely to be used as a pencil holder. I glazed the outside with "burnt sugar" and again used a sponge to wipe it. The inside was glazed with a clear glaze.

Some years ago I was commissioned to do a stained glass piece for Enniscorthy Community Hospital, and I had some beautiful coloured glass left over. I brought a small compartmentalised storage box of glass bits to the ceramics workshop to use and share with the others in the group. Though the picture below shows only four compartments, there are actually 21 in the box, each containing a different colour or type of glass.

I added a few pieces of an irridescent green to the bottom of the coil pencil holder and it melted quite nicely!