Sunday, February 9, 2014

A Ceramic Hare for my Forest Shrine

I've really been enjoying working with ceramics.  One of the projects I'm working on is a forest shrine, and this little rabbit/hare will play a prominent role.

So far, I've just been sculpting with the clay and doing some very simple glazing such as the roof on my fairy house.  But with this hare, the time has come to do more complicated glazing work and I'm having a hard time.  I really like the sculpting, but I'm scared that I'll ruin the whole thing with the glazing.

When I draw or paint, I am very precise with my placement of colors and I work hard with a variety of colors to render fur.  It seems that this approach will not be possible with glazes, so I'll have to come up with a new look.

Here are the unfired glazes.  As far as I can tell so far, there are two tricky parts.  The first one is keeping track of which un-fired glaze color turns into which fired glaze color.  It's completely unintuitive and it's a real challenge to keep track of what color I'm putting where.

The other challenge is that the glaze requires three coats.  So not only do I need to get the colors placed correctly, but I need to get them lined up for each of the three coats.  Of course in some places they overlap, and I'm wondering what will happen there.

The piece is in the kiln now, so tomorrow morning I'll get to see how I did.

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