Pimping: EMG

[kelkyag]

Stealing a page from cointeach's book, I point out that Ellen Million Graphics will be closing down the gift shop over the few ~6 months. Ms. Million's store has provided me with many charming tshirts, cards, tote bags, and other amusing objects adorned with fantasy or SF art. While she points out that there are now many places for artists to have their

Comments

[jencallisto]

Ooh, that triangular bowl is gorgeous! I love the color, the swirl on the side, the edges, everything!

[kelkyag]

The three sides are different, as I was mostly messing around with slip trailing. Feature or bug?

[jaedian]

I agree, the triangular bowl is so cool. I am also biased by the glaze color, but I think it is really neat. How do you make a bowl like that? Is it slabs joined together?

[kelkyag]

Yup, it's built out of rolled-out slabs of clay. Next time I'll cut a paper template for the sides, as stacking up slabs of clay to try to make the shapes match doesn't work very gracefully. Fun experiment, though.

[merimask]

The triangular bowl is stunning!!

I actually like the mug quite a bit...the textures are just wonderful. I see where you were going with it. If you'd had the blue from the bowl on the bottom portion, it would have made it less monochromatic & simulated a sea/land/sky progression which would be charming.

[kelkyag]

I was trying for stone/river/sky/sun, but all the colors have too much brown in them, the shapes are too abstract, and the shape of the river didn't work. Brushed-on glaze apparently goes on a lot thinner than I thought. I may try slathering on more glaze and asking to have it re-fired (I don't think it can make the colors worse), but getting glaze to stick to a glazed surface is tricky.

[merimask]

You know...if you modify the bottom portion (stone?) it really would look a lot like swirly Japanese waves. Then, you could easily dip the lower part in glaze, get a thick rich deep blue, and tip in some thick white "foam" between sea and land. More thick white accents in the swirly cloudy sky (it'd add texture too) and it'd make a STUNNING mug.

That way you'd have the brown earth tone layered between blue and the pale sky, and it'd be an accent rather than overwhelming.

Holy cow I would happily buy that from you (& matching rice bowls, & a matching no-handle tea cup...!!)

[kelkyag]

You can imagine these things vastly more clearly than I can implement them. :)

The japanese waves are *so* iconic ... I'd want to spend a lot of time with a sketch book and reference material before I tried that. I do have this beach mask here, though, which has much simpler lines ...

It definitely needs less brown. Color-wise, I can see wanting the land in the center, but I also sort of want it at the bottom, for grounding. Maybe at the bottom and unglazed or with an oxide wash (not that I've tried those yet), though spodumene would also make a nice sand color if I can get it to be brown rather than white. Some rutile blue in the ocean and letting it run down over the unglazed section could work. Using a light slip on the sections that aren't supposed to be earth might also help with the coloring, so even if the glaze is thin the clay won't show through so brown. It seems backward to carve and then slip, but I think it would work.

Lots of experiments to try!

[merastra]

The triangular bowl is pretty cool. And it's blue to boot! :-)

Actually the carved mug kind of nice too, especially since I saw it after reading all the comments. :-) I kind of like the brown scheme.

[kelkyag]

It's not the first thing I've posted that's blue. What makes this blue a more appealing one? (Actually, it's the same glaze on the same clay as this, which got no comments ... oh, I posted the pointer to that on dreamwidth rather than livejournal. Heh. Well, that's informative. :)

Is blue-over-white better than blue-over-brown?

[merastra]

I like the pattern and design on the triangular one better. That's because it's execution is more precise, I'm partial to the "curly brace" shape of the top edge, and prefer the swirly-design on the triangular one to the nubs on the first cup.

Ok, so I don't want to make your perfectionism any more raging (heh :-) but it's possible that if the coil cup was uber-precise, I'd give it a few more "pretty" points. Right now it seems kind of gelatinous to me. I'm not sure it's worth addressing that though since the major factor is that design-wise, the patterns on the triangular one really appeals to me and coils do not. It's an apples and oranges thing.

I *do* like how the coil cup has more white showing through on the blue glaze.

[kelkyag]

Heh. I'm actually not so fond of the way the white stoneware shows through the blue glaze. I like porcelain, and I like the brown stoneware, but indifference-at-best to the white stoneware seems to be one of the few points on which I share tastes with my teacher.

Calling my coil-building 'wobbly' would be putting it very lightly -- I'm still trying to figure out how to make my coils even (I should probably ask for some pointers on that ...), and the little cup was the first thing I built that way, so that it's mushy is not surprising at all, and the nubs make that even worse.

That said, I find the triangle bowl about as wobbly. The top curves aren't symmetric, and the slip designs are even more wildly off. Different design tastes, I'll totally give you, but precision of execution? I figure I did well keeping the sides mostly straight. :)
(It'd be a more practical bowl if they curved outward, but that's for some other experiment.)