Today, a mess of test tiles and this piece came out of the kiln. I'm not showing the piece in its entirety because I don't like it. It was one of those pieces that I never liked actually, not from the time I finished carving it. The plate was too thin and the porportions of the design was off and the carving was too shallow. And it doesn't sit right. The bottom is not flat enough and the plate sits kind of crooked as a result. The piece was just a bust from the start. I wanted to but didn't smash it after the bisque firing. Instead I decided that I was going to see it through to the end. After the bisque firing, I applied a wash of iron oxide, then I spent about five hours painting the piece with underglaze. The next day I washed off all the underglaze. Then I glazed it. Painting on the glazes took about five more hours. I used about fifteen different kinds of glazes (three shino glazes, a matte glaze, and about eleven different colors of glossy glazes.)
I'm not happy with the piece so the challenge is to find some aspects of it that I do like. Okay, so: I do like the leaves at the top. Those are three different glazes, a pistachio shino, a green shino, and a blue-green glaze. I like the flowers, though two of the glazes I used--cedar shino and pumpkin gloss--fired out too similarly in color. And can you spot my mistake? (I forgot to glaze the flowers' centers. Sigh.)
So that's that.
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