Summer Solstice

You've got to love the day of the year that gives you the most amount of sunlight? I certainly did. The bisque firing at Clayworks was a success, and because I wanted to get everything ready for the gas kiln firing on Wednesday, I spent a lot of time glazing Herr Goose, the cave art bottles and some porcelain birds. Turns out there won't be enough work to fill the kiln by Weds. No worries. That gives me time to prep many more birdlets. (Yep. These guys are sitting near the stove. I need a home studio! )


And it may give Big Bird, fondly named "Eddie" by hubby Fred, time to dry.

Eddie is my biggest piece to date. Julie, the Studio Manager at Clayworks says I need to do a series of 10 of him. Hmmm. Five maybe. Then again....

Back at Storybrook I finally tried to construct a light box. Don't have the funds to buy one so I googled "light box" and found several sites that tell you how to DIY. After constructing it from a cardboard box, tracing paper & masking tape, Fred & I took it for a test run. Here are some of our tests, beginning with a barrel-fired bird. .

And another...

And yet another.

We used a matte white posterboard for the birds and matte black for some of the parietal pieces. Here's "Four Horses" from Chauvet in southern France. (There are 4, but I only portrayed 3).

Another piece that I'm rather fond of is this more recent bottle featuring another image from Chauvet, this one an auroch, now extinct. I'm leaning more & more to less glaze on the parietal pieces. And rather than using underglazes, I'm experimenting with the more subtle use of slips for the animals.

This was an earlier piece. Lots of glaze, perhaps too much, but it was handy for our light box photo tests.

I went a little crazy, excited by the process, and began pulling old pieces off the shelves to snap. This is a pic of a piece I did about a year ago when I first started modeling/sculpting. It's our dog Spanky. The shino went all white and the black turned blue, totally unlike our tan and black brindle boy. But he was a great lesson in how one glaze reacts with another and all react with the clay body.

We still have a long way to go with the light box...stronger wattage perhaps, more experimentation on the settings...many, many more test shots. Neither Fred nor I are professional photographers. (When I need photos of my work for juried shows I'll always opt for a pro.) But for other purposes it's good to be able to take shots that better showcase my work than a bat full of birds by my stove in the kitchen.

Lastly, here's a pic of an opossum I made over a year ago, inspired by an unfortunate opossum that was hit by a car. Both the mother and one of her babies didn't make it, though one of the babies did survive and was released back into the wild. I wanted to post it because opossums seem to reach out to a lot of clay artists. Thanks, Linda!

It's a good thing that the Summer Solstice offers the longest daylight of the year. And now that the fireflies have long since put away their golden light box lanterns, it's time for me to put away mine.