Layers of History - Making and Applying custom decals

 I am now on the third "layer" of these new Egyptian History/politics inspired pieces.  The first was the Slip-Inlay, and underglaze.  Then, in the last step I applied multiple glazes to each piece, at least 2, sometimes 3 or 4 glazes per piece.  This step actually had me thoroughly stressed out, because, although I do perform glaze tests, I usually don't test how glazes layer and mix with others.  I was also playing with three different types of clay on this round: Manganese, Porcelain and B-Mix with sand, both thrown and slip cast.  The way the glazes responded in all these different factors was unknown to me until I unloaded the kiln.  Thankfully they all came out pretty great, the weird color combinations I had tried, worked well together.

The next step was now applying decals that I printed from the UCB Studio's HP Laserjet.  There really is nothing special about this printer, only that HP laserjets toner has iron in it. 

I started by scanning in Tweets and images from a great book called "Tweets from Tahrir" as well as finding some great photos online from the Egyptian revolution and aftermath.  I positioned them on an 8.5x11" art board in Photoshop and kept in mind the size for the majority of my pieces.  I was able to fit everything for 20 pieces onto 5 decal papers.  Everything that is scanned or taken from the internet needs to be converted to B/W and made high contrast before it is printed onto the paper.

Applying it is simple too.  If you have done this with commercial decals, I'm not sure how similar or different it is, having never used them before. 
You'll need a shallow bowl with water, a sponge, and some kind of card, or hard edge to remove the bubbles.

1. Cut the decal as close to the image as possible with scissors or a blade
2. Submerge it in the water, and let it soak for a few minutes.  You'll know it's done when the decal image starts to slide off the paper backing.
3. Keep the decal image and paper together and gently remove them from the water.
4. Slowly slide the decal image off of the paper and onto your glazed ceramic surface.
5. Use the sponge to softly push it down, from the middle towards the outside of the image.  And do the same with the hard edge or card to remove all bubbles.
6. Then fire the piece to Cone 018 - the iron will flux into your already glazed piece and voila! You have a dark sepia-like image of your custom made decal.

1 bag of clay...

Not bad for a days work...

Today I played with a new clay (for me), Navajo wheel, which I picked up at Clay Planet last weekend. I sat down and threw one whole bag, and absolutely loved it. Very workable and a beautiful color. Can't wait to see how it reacts to my glazes and the firing.

Slip Inlay and Sgraffito - Hieroglyphs

Hieroglyphs applied with slip inlay - in greenware state

One of the many decorating techniques that I learned at the fabulous San Jose City College was Slip Inlay.  This was actually courtesy of the wonderful (and late) Julia Terr. She was a visiting artist at SJCC and enlightened our class with her techniques in throwing and decorating.  This included: goblets and pitchers, glazes and, of course, slip inlay.

I became fascinated by her methods and decided to explore some of her techniques in my own work.  I made some of my own style of goblets (as seen in the previous posting).  I also re-created the beautiful green glaze, which she supplied the recipe for (and which was also my first foray into glaze making).  And I explored slip inlay.  Of course at SJCC we were somewhat limited by the slips, having only black, white, blue and green.  However, here at UC Berkeley we are blessed to have a wide array of colored slips.  This includes metallic colored slips (which I prefer due to the sheen produced in Mid – High range firing) as well as those colored by stains. 

The image above shows greenware bowls, and one cup that have been decorated using the metallic slips: Cobalt Oxide, Manganese Dioxide, Red Iron Oxide, Black Copper Oxide, and Rutile Oxide.  Most of these bowls were thrown in Babu Porcelain and decorated with the Slip inlay method that I learned from Julia.  If you've never done it before this is how it is done:
1. use a needle or sgraffito tool to carve a pattern or image into the surface (pretty deep). 
2. Then fill it in with the slip with a large brush, you will need to apply multiple coats.  The slip is thick enough when you can no longer see the carved image through it. 
3. let it dry sufficiently, dry side of leather hard, almost bone dry.
4. Then scrape the slip off with a metal rib.  Some of the clay surface will come off too.  This is why the carving should be pretty deep.

On the last bowl I used the sgraffito method, with is even easier and can be used with slips, underglazes and glazes. I just painted a thick layer of the slip over the leather hard surface of the bowl.  Then used the sgraffito tool to draw and image into it, thereby carving away the slip and revealing the clay underneath. 

Egypt's modern Intermediate Period - through pottery (In progress)

The upcoming few posts will most likely be a series of in progress photos, thoughts, and comments...

Currently I'm still decorating greenware.  I've done some slip inlay and some underglaze painting on bone dry ware.  Basically, the idea is that this lowest layer will reflect the historical Egypt.  Nearly every piece features a phrase or set of words in Egyptian Hieroglyphs (I spent the last year learning to read and write Middle Egyptian).

After the bisque firing I will be layering multiple glazes on each piece.  Some areas will have transparent glazes and others more opaque glazes.  It's all experimentation at this point.  After the cone 6 glaze firing I'm going to apply decals of images from the January/February 2011 Egyptian Revolution and decals of actual Tweets that were posted during that time period and fire at 018 (The Tweets have been scanned from the book Tweets from Tahrir). 



One of the basic concepts is the element of communication: pottery to Tweets. Another is the element of weapons and parallels between historical events and those of the modern conflicts. History really does repeat itself.

Bringing History into the Present

During a recent heart-to-heart with Ehren Tool we discussed my two majors: Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations (Egyptology) and Ceramics and why there is not more of a crossover between the two.  I've been putting some thought and research into this and have decided to explore a new avenue in my work.  Although I have greatly improved my skills in building, throwing and glaze techniques in the last few years, Ehren is right. With my background in Egyptian history, art and politics and with the recent political turmoil I really should be doing more to bring the two together. Soon to come will be images of the first wave of this work, in progress.  I feel this will be a source of years of material and I hope that it will prove to spread awareness about this great and historic country.

Intentional flaws... Is this possible?

In the last kiln I fired I used a number of new glazes.  One of which was from the Electric Firing book, called Alligator Green. I layered it over my glossy licorice black to see what kind of effect I would get.  The cup on the left is more or less the effect I expected. However the one on the right did some unexpected things. I think this could be because of the underfiring that caused me to have to unload and reload then refire the kiln. Although this was unexpected, it is definitely interesting. But could it be attempted again with the same results?

Ceramics and Patriotism i.e. Clay and Firecrackers

Since today was the 4th of July the studio was pretty dead.  In order to liven things up, and in honor of the 4th of July, Maile decided to blow-up small balls of clay.  Of course firecrackers are illegal in California, so this was all done in a contained area - very safe of course!



Maile's idea was to embed a small firecracker in a fist size ball of clay and put it inside a plaster mold, basically casting the mold with the exploded clay bits. The result of which is to the right... a busted mold. oops!

After Ehren's objections about this configuration and claims that this was virtually a bomb, we switched molds to a large open neck amphora mold.  The procedure itself took a while to get perfect. Lots of turning the mold, up and over and eventually taking it off the table all together.  The open neck also caused problems with the explosive noise and projectile clay.  We eventually learned to cover the neck with a piece of wood, but it was tricky getting the lighter in and out before it exploded. Eventually Maile just about got it down, see the video to see how she did it. 

Donupology update...

The newest "Donupology" was constructed yesterday. As I said before, practice makes perfect. Not that this is perfect, in any way. But, it was loads easier to put together than the previous two.

Donuts and Topology

"Donupology #1" With Waxing Brown Glaze

"Donupology #2" With Rutile Bone Glaze

Last Semester my experiments with throwing and altering led to a combination of throwing donuts and Topology, what I call "Donupology".

The first of these experiments is the image to the right.  I get my best ideas when I'm driving (as previously mentioned) and this one came to me on just such an occasion.  I had started to work with throwing donuts months before, (throwing and altering by cutting them apart and looping them over other closed forms). This was a whole different ball game.

The piece to the left was my second attempt, but I made the mistake of letting the donuts get too hard before trying to construct them.  It broke apart quite a few times. It is also more difficult than you'd think to keep the two donuts the same height and general width (not circumference).  This one did not fit these parameters and was hard to construct.  The other issue with these is that due to the precarious joints they need to dry really slowly, and need to be turned every few hours to make sure they dry evenly.

Two newly thrown Donuts soon to be made into a "Donupology"

 Practice makes perfect though, as they always say... I'm hoping that this next batch of donuts leads to a spectacular "donupology".

The final issue that will need to be resolved with the last one will be the firing. With the last two, the stilts ended up getting stuck to the bottom of the pieces.  After seeing that the glaze had run on the first, I decided to go with a very stable glaze on the second and wiped it thin to keep that from happening.  No such luck.  Although the glaze did not run, the piece may have been too heavy for the stilts to support it and it ended up bending them into the glaze. Ehren wasn't (too) mad, he just said, "That's what your materials fee is for." Thank God!"

Any tips on how to prevent this in the future would be greatly appreciated.  As a side note, I would rather not leave the bottom unglazed.  I would like it to have the illusion of being a continuous piece and I think a line along the bottom without glaze destroys this. One plus is that on this new one the stilts provide a really nice, stable support to help keep it from rolling. There's always a silver lining!

Playing with Glazes

FileMaker Pro - Glaze Database

Inquiry & Experimentation:
Another thing that I really enjoy experimenting with is glazes.  As I mentioned in the intro to this Blog, I began my Clay education working in a studio that fired Cone 10 Reduction (San Jose City College).  Since then I have been virtually obsessed with the results that can be achieved through different types of glazing processes.  When I started going to UC Berkeley, I learned that the studio only fired to cone 04 because the clay that they provided was a low fire clay.

When I started working with my own clays I chose cone 6 because most of the kilns at Cal are electric, and because it is more economical to fire cone 6 than cone 10.  I could also get the same type of clay, generally (B-Mix with sand) and the body was still really strong.  The only problem was that most cone 6 glazes couldn't do what reduction could do.  So I made it a mission of mine to find glazes that could replicate the cone 10 reduction results. I found some great recipes in books like: Mastering Cone 6 Glazes and Electric Firing (Both found at Clay Planet in Santa Clara). Although these books have provided me with some awesome glazes, some of which I have remade multiple times, I have still yet to find exact duplicates for some of my favorites: Copper Red being the main one. 

All of this testing and retesting, led to a stack of journals and sheets of paper full of glaze recipes. Some of them tested others left untested due to missing ingredients.  This in turn led to my Glaze Database....

Organization:
Last year, I got FileMaker Pro in order to organize my research for my Thesis.  Since then I have been virtually obsessed with database making.  the latest being a glaze database (above).  This database allowed me to be rid of the slips of paper and have all the recipes in one place, complete with images of the glaze tests and the last date that I mixed the glaze. I've only used it a hand full of times since its creation, but I'm pretty much loving it.  Then again I'm a nerd.  If you're a nerd too you should think about something like this for your glaze organization.