I signed up for another pottery class this session, after a 5-month hiatus. I want to go back to a series of work I made 2 summers ago--beach-themed pottery. I have become obsessed with starfish. If you live near me, or talk to me frequently, you know this. I cannot get enough of them. I search for photos of them, I watch youtube videos featuring them, etc. etc.
2 summers ago, I helped to organize a wedding shower for a friend of mine, and we held it at the beach. I decided to make serving dishes for the buffet, and this is what I ended up with:
above, you see a small plate decorated with...uh...some kind of shells. You know the ones I mean. Like conch shells, but less lumpy-bumpy and smaller. I used oxides to paint the shells, but glazed the plate clear.
Below is a small bowl I made in which I mixed a more basic claybody with porcelain, using the finer clay for the motifs I added.
Right and below: a low, flat dish I made, using scallop shell motifs. All of the shapes used here were molded from actual sea shells.
Cute little starfish!
I think that using porcelain yielded the nicest result, but mixing 2 claybodies is usually a bad idea in pottery. Each dries at a different rate, and so they might not bond well during firing. If you look closely, this is slightly noticeable in the starfish bowl.
I used clear glaze on these pieces because I wanted to expose the claybody--I recycled this clay from the big bin in our studio, and it looks very 'sandy' which works nicely with the shapes I added.
And yes, that's my cordless phone in the first shot. I was talking with a friend, but wanted to snap the pix before the sun slipped out of the sky (this explains the glow you see in the shots of the small bowl).
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