Opening an alpine kiln...

it's always exciting when there's an alpine kiln being unloaded! it's like Christmas... only with ceramics! I took a chance and loaded all my pieces on the same shelf in the kiln, so they would either turn out awesome.. or not so much... AND THEY WERE AWESOME~!!! I had around 5 pieces with this combination of glazes and various effects. I only took pictures of the baby bowl it's the size of two hands cupped together.

spirograph

I had an awesome opportunity to take an up-close picture of a scissor-tailed-fly catcher.... and then my friend scared it off >_<

Anyway. I remember playing with this, a spirograph, as a kid. They used to have them as party favors and I guess just more available. It was really hard to find and get a hold of one. And unfortunately it doesn't have as many options to increase contrast... but this was a trail run just to get used to using the  small circles and constraints. I'll explore it more at some point

Ceramics

After a weird result in beginning ceramics I'd avoided the shino glaze for the rest of that semester as well as the one after. However for some reason as a pet side project I became interested in it and wanted to explore the glaze family.

This shino is named after one of the founding fathers of shino,

his name escapes me at the moment, but there's a lot of speckles

that were cause from the clay body as well as additional iron

sprinkles.

It's interesting because the areas where the glaze was thicker, 

are slightly (a few millimeters) thicker by feel as well as whiter

in appearance.

This is the shino available at OU. The dark areas/gray areas are
where carbon was trapped within the glaze, the orange was where
the glaze was thinner as well as protected by wax. On the left,
you can faintly see some texture--that is created by the glaze
separating or "crawling."  I think Shino is the only glaze at OU
that does that.

There is also White Shino! So instead of orange the parts that
were protected from the carbon trapping and "dirty" firing
are white instead of orange.

The following two pictures show the same bowl from different angles. This was the bowl I was talking about in yesterday's post. This piece, I feel, made the whole pet project worth it.  It's also from OU shino, but due to the firing and the pieces it was next to a lot of interesting things happened. The purple/red you see is from copper flashing from the piece next to it. You can see the gray spots where carbon was trapped. The little spots are actual indentions where the glaze crawled. Overall, it just turned out a lot cooler than I was expecting.

 I finally figured out/ was taught the correct way of doing coptic stitching! As a result have a little quarter sized booklet (60 pages). The booklet is actually an insert into a cover created with book board, glue, and some scrap booking paper. Another booklet design learned and tucked under my belt :p

There's something about the announcement of the last day to use wet clay that makes me put all other ceramic assignments aside and just start throwing as many bowls as I can... I don't know why, it just happens.  As a result I have 12 bowls that will need to be trimmed on Thursday and since I stayed late I was able to pug and reclaim all the scrap clay I've accumulated... so I'll be set to throw more bowls after trimming.

On a side note I also got to help load the kiln and had the honor of lighting one of the burners.  It was fun experience and after that I learned a lot from Dan who fired a couple of my bowls over spring break. He explained how one of my bowls ended up so interesting. (I forgot to take a picture AND to take it home... I'll show it later) But Shino is a very interesting and extremely finicky glaze.

I was kidnapped into going to Petco with friends. While there I had fun watching the rodents; there was a particularly cute female rat that kept cleaning herself...Anyway it took me a little bit to realize I actually had my camera with me and so I ended taking a couple videos of the more active animals and from there sketched a little.

Catch up post

Thursday before spring break:
    the two images below were experimentation with an origami envelope and a doodling of my hand

Friday before spring break:
   I bought a circle cutter. Using that I decided to practice my craft as well as experimenting




Monday of Spring break
   I saw some designer's packaging design for a cd so I decided to experiment too

Tuesday of Spring break:
       If you haven't noticed I have a weird fascination with notebooks. Here is an accordion book    design that I found particularly interesting

Wednesday of Spring break
   I needed to run some errands around campus and since I had my camera with me I decided to take some practice pictures for an eventual entry for the school's agenda photo

Thursday of Spring Break

    The night of the Midnight showing for the Hunger Games! My friends decided to dress up and since I was lazy and didn't I was given the role of photographer

Friday of Spring Break

  I stitched together all the cloud photos I took in photoshop to create some panoramic shots.

infographics

My new obsession!

I am an impulsive/compulsive buyer when it comes to cute small notebooks. I just can't help myself. However today I learned that there's a machine in our book arts classroom that allows us to do the binding that a lot of these said small notebooks have..... BEST DAY EVER! So I'm probably going to entertain myself by designing covers. If I design enough that I like I might try selling them at the Union.

My birthday boy. He turned 2, and is officially older than me
when converted to human age.

Index card booklet~

I have a weird habit of collecting recipes... and well inevitably losing them as well. Luckily I like keeping the good ones written in multiple places. I also have a weird obsession with little notebooks. So I made a small booklet with a pamphlet stitch to put my vegan cupcake recipes in. (One of my friends is allergic to eggs)

Missing Posts

Wednesday :

My exploration on illustrating an orange... I'm still not sure about all the speckles though

Thursday:

Sunset & I just happened to have my camera when I flock of birds flew overhead. I wish I had my telephoto lens, but it's still kind of interesting ...?

Friday:

We just finished our accordion books in our book arts class, but I was playing around with the idea of exploring the possibilities with this design:

Same premise as last post only this time no eraser.... eh meh. I want to say this was a picture I found of Kate Winslet's former eye candy.

drawing

I miss drawing. I've also had this song stuck in my head for the past week or so. As a challenge I paused the MV and set a timer to 10 minutes to see how close I could get. Surprisingly I got quite a bit done within the first 5 minutes, but since it was just rough sketching I soon noticed mistakes so I spent the rest of the time adjusting and correcting. The result isn't perfect, but not bad for 10 minutes.

I'll probably do more of these challenges

hm

I've always had a fascination with Fireworks.. that said.. I also haven't seen the Fourth of July firework display in years... something about the traffic and being mosquito bait has usually prevented me from going... maybe this year though?

anyway- a quick illustrator/pen to experimentation on a firework

Pit Fire Piece~!

I picked up my pit fire piece today! It turned out very nicely. I wish there was a more reliable way to predicting what causes the flashes of color... but oh well...

(I didn't have my camera on me, so thanks to Megan Campbell for taking these with her snazzy iphone)