My First Commissioned Piece : Mickey Urn

Sadly, my first sort of commissioned piece was an urn for my sister's beloved canine friend, Mickey.  Since my sister is a Mickey Mouse fanatic, and her dog was named after Mickey Mouse, she looked long and hard for a Disney urn for him, but couldn't find anything suitable.  So she asked me to make him one.

I knew it had to have Mickey ears, and be the red and black Mickey colors, but I was really pleased that I could also use Mickey font and add my own handmade paw print stamps to it, for a really special result (with sincere apologies to the Disney Corporation for license infringement, I would never have done it except my sister was desperate and had searched the entire magic kingdom to no avail) :

 

It turned out even sweeter than I had hoped.  But then in a nasty twist of fate, the wax with alumina hydrate which I used between the lid and the vessel, which was supposed to keep the two pieces apart, didn't work.  So I ended up with this absolutely adorable pet urn, with the lid fused solid to it.

Over a series of evenings, I tried everything I could think of, or read about, involving tapping, freezing, thawing, freezing and dipping the lid in near-boiling water, spraying with WD40, and praying, and more tapping.  I only came short of using a blow torch on it, since I don't have a torch (although a friend of mine is offering a dessert torch to try).

So I'm afraid unless a miracle happens, I may need to start over again, and make another urn for my sister, this time a functional one.

At least on my second try, I think I'll keep it simpler, as on the first one, I had carved the name, and then finished all the black parts in black slip, before I started to doubt that it would be black enough, and then repeated them all in black underglaze.  The next time I'll keep it simple, and go straight to the red underglaze and black underglaze.  And I'm pretty sure I'll fire the two pieces separately in the final firing, taking the chance of warping over the chance that they may fuse again.

 

Cobalt Pieces from the Workshop with Kinichi Shigeno

I had the honour recently to take a one day workshop with Kinichi Shigeno, and learned some of his techniques working with cobalt.

I wasn't sure quite what to expect, other than I looked up some of his work, and it was quite detailed and beautiful.  So I brought along 2 bisqued plates, a vase, and a mug, to decorate.

Kinichi brought some cobalt powder, which we mixed with water in a tiny cup, for our detail work.  Jay had also mixed up some cobalt solutions, for which he had made some test tiles.  The darker stain (which went on purple) was labelled 6388 mason mix, and the lighter one (which went on blue) was labelled 6339 mason mix.  I decided I would make a couple of pieces from each.

The technique we used was to cut out shapes (in my case, cherry blossoms) from newspaper, and adhere them with liquid latex.  I also brushed on the branches directly in latex (the red lines in the first photo below).  The plate was thrown from Columbia Buff w/Grog clay, but I had covered the inside with white slip, with black underglaze on the rim and back.

We sprayed on the cobalt mixture, then removed the paper and latex.  After that, we used the tiny cup of cobalt mix, to brush on fine details.

This is the result :

Quite stunning, right?

The second plate was again CB w/Grog covered in white slip, and with black underglaze on the rim. I skipped the newspaper and just painted both the branches and flowers in latex :

This time, I added a newspaper moon while spraying the plate, and then removed it and lightly sprayed again. 

I did a similar thing with a CB w/Grog mug.

The effect is quite magical, I think :

The mug and plate make a pretty good set, even though I had not planned it that way.  Both of them are sprayed in Clear Glaze, with the plate having Deep Blue glaze on the back, and the mug being dipped on the rim with Daly Blue (to create the purple rim).

The vase, I again finished in the darker cobalt spray, this time using triangles of newspaper as a resist for the spray :

At the end of the workshop, we had a small amount of cobalt in our cup remaining, so I have another sculptural piece which I subsequently decorated in cobalt, but since that one is a Christmas present, it will need to wait until I am able to post it.

Oh, and I took a photo of the master, who was a really kind and humble man, working on one of his pieces in between guiding us and helping us with the spraying :

Some of his works involve several layers of subsequent colors and firings, and are quite elaborate.