I spent all of 2021 practicing my wheel throwing technique. It was fun! I made A LOT of pots. I still have a long way to go but I am now pretty comfortable at the wheel and am now shifting some of my focus to glazing. I want to play with different glaze colors and do more detail painting in 2022. I am going to be "testing" my ideas on smaller bowls and then hopefully replicating some of the successes on larger pieces.
Above are two different attempts at a watermelon bowl and an orange bowl. I want to share what didn't work and then what I tweaked to get better results. The base clay on all four bowls is speckled buff which fires to a tan with darker brown specks in it. You can see this coming through the glaze on all four pieces but it's most notable on the white.
For my first watermelon, I painted the outside stripes in two different colors of green. The glaze was Blick Essentials Gloss Glaze in clover and emerald isle. I did two coats of each stripe. I painted the inside with red Speedball underglaze and then added the seeds with black Speedball underglaze. After the glazes dried, I painted the inside and outside with a clear coat of gloss glaze.
As you can see, the inside (left bowl shown above) turned out pretty good! There is a worn spot in the center (I had to redo one of the seeds and wiped it off and clearly didn't get a good coat down again) but the red color is great. The outside (left bowl shown below) is fine but less of a "wow" than I wanted it to be. The stripe colors blend together and the clay body shows through a lot, making the green look pretty dark.
Based on these results, I made some adjustments to my second watermelon. I kept the inside the same but added a white Speedball underglaze to the outside before painting my stripes (again in clover and emerald isle). I left some white peaking through to add an extra bit of detail. I again coated the whole thing with a clear coat before it went to be fired.
I LOVE how it looks! Truly such a fun bowl that I can't wait to replicate on a larger scale (imagine it filled with a fruit salad!).
The orange bowl was my first attempt at detail painting a design. For the first version, I painted the entire bowl, inside and out with Blick Essentials gloss glaze in clover, hoping it would have a light green base. Then, with a small paint brush, I painted my emerald isle leaves before dabbing on the oranges using a pencil eraser and gloss glaze in the mandarin color. It looked awesome before firing (left above) but afterwards it just looked like a muted green with some light orange circles. On the one (sad) hand, the color was underwhelming. On the other (exciting) hand, I could see my leaves and oranges which meant the glaze had mostly held it's position. My painting effort was worth it, it just needed a better base.
So for round two, I painted the inside and outside of the bowl in the Speedball white underglaze and then added my leaves in clover and my oranges in mandarin. (I added a bit of detail on the leaves with the darker emerald isle glaze but this didn't really come through.) I coated the inside and out with a clear coat before firing because I wasn't sure how matte the white underglaze would be.
And you can see it turned out! If I did this version again I would just add more oranges and more leaves to make it more similar detail wise to the first attempt. I am so excited to play more with painting (and more color!) now. I hope to share more successes (and failures) here this spring as I practice. Let's call this part one of one hundred.
