As a ceramic artist, I have always felt this back-and-forth between making sculpture and making functional work. I think sculpture is my heart’s calling, but I can never quite shake the need to make functional stuff every once in awhile. There’s something really satisfying about spending your day-to-day mealtimes and rituals with your artwork (and the work of others, too). I also love functional work because it’s easier to give as a gift, and fundamentally, I believe that art is the artist’s gift to the world.

As I mentioned last post, I’ve been in a bind with sculpting lately because the raku kiln I’m working on is not yet ready. But, I still wanted to get some sculpture through to completion. So, I decided to sgraffito on my sculpture. Here is the result:

“To Know Darkness”

In fables and stories, the dark forest is often a place where characters must face some sort of trial or threat, go through a transformation, or have their fate redirected in unpredictable ways. It is a mysterious and not altogether pleasant place that ultimately shapes the character’s personality and destiny. In my adult life, I liken the dark forest to the struggle of the mind: with issues like depression, anxiety, addiction, and inner conflict. I wanted to make a piece expressing how each of us has our own dark forest that we must pass through. I chose a deer for the subject because deer are prey animals, and represent the feeling of vulnerability we have when dealing with heavy issues of mental stress.

This image of the dark forest resonated deeply with me as I was making the work. I remembered the apprehension of childhood tales, wondering if the characters in the story would make it out okay. I also thought of people I know, currently struggling with their own weighty issues, and it just seemed to make a lot of sense as a metaphor. I have a feeling this forest will persist in my personal imagery for awhile.

As I was carving the trees and deer’s fur, I began to wonder what the design would look like on other surfaces. It suddenly struck me that the design might translate well to cups and other functional work. I was seized by the desire to test it out. After completing the sculpture, I took to my sketchbook and drew several pages of cup shapes with the dark forest design on them. I wanted something organic and comfortable to use that also wouldn’t minimize the impact of the design. Ultimately, the form I chose was this:

“Dark Forest Mug”

I think it works well!

The whole cup was covered in black underglaze while leather hard, then I decorated the outside with the dark forest sgraffito carving. I also carried the design a tiny bit over to the inside of the rim. That’s a design trick I picked up from one of my favorite potters, Lorna Meaden. (Which, by the way, her work is seriously delicious, check it out here.) I used a matte clear glaze on the outside to keep a subtle look, while lining the inside with a shiny clear for durability. I wanted to make sure the form, function, and design were all working together, which balancing act, in my opinion, is the toughest and also most intriguing challenge of making functional pottery.

I can’t wait to get back in to the studio to make more of these cups, and quite possibly some other functional forms to sgraffito on! It’s always exciting to be at the beginning of a new style of work!

As you may realize from my current work, I’m into black and white ceramics.

It’s not that I don’t like using color: I love it! In fact, that is one of the reasons I fell so hard for mosaic art. I love the brilliant colors and juicy depth of the glass. Theoretically, glaze is also glass, so I should have just as much success with colorful glazes, right?

Well, not so much. I have been trying for many years to figure out the perfect colorful finish for my work. I have tried colored slips, underglazes, stains, majolica, gas glazes, electric glazes, oil paint, decoupage, encaustics, you name it. I was never 100% satisfied with any of these finishes on my sculptural work. Or my functional work for that matter. I never felt that sense of harmony that the surface treatment “fit” the piece and adequately showed off the craftsmanship underneath. For years I liked my pieces best at the leather-hard stage: that is, before they had any glaze applied to them.

Then I tried an experiment: raku glazing one of my sculptures. It was this one, “Dilemma:”

I couldn’t have been more thrilled with the result. The subtle finish complimented my sculpting and carving marks, and looked entirely natural on the piece. The black and white color scheme was striking, and helped convey the somewhat poignant mood I was aiming for.

That was last year, in 2012. Now it’s 2013, and it’s experiment time again. My current studio at the School of Craft doesn’t yet have a raku kiln, although I am working on building one. But up until the kiln is completed (and it gets a little more seasonable to stand outside to do it!) I wanted to figure out an alternate finish for my pieces that I could do in our electric kiln.

And that, ladies and gentleman, brings me to the title of the post: sgraffito! To sgraffito, you must cover your work in colored slip or underglaze, then carve through that painted layer to make your design. If you use black underglaze on white clay, you get a striking, graphic look, much like a linoleum block print. I learned how to sgraffito as an undergraduate, but I never really thought much of it until I took at workshop at Arrowmont in 2007 with the Sgraffito Queen herself, Kathy King. That was my first Arrowmont experience, and was it ever amazing! Kathy was a really fun and energetic instructor, and the group we had in the class was very easygoing as well. Kathy kept the atmosphere good-humored and fast paced, giving us all room to experiment and even goof off a little. She even gave us hand-drawn handouts of her glaze recipes and techniques, which I still consult to this day. Thanks, Kathy!!!

Kathy’s work uses imagery inspired by indie comics, pinup girls, and other forms of pop culture to give her often satirical take on the experience of the modern woman. Her work is often hilarious, sometimes poignant, never apologetic. One that particularly sticks in my mind is her hilarious take on cramps: showing a despondent looking egg dressed in a suit and briefcase, being chased away by devils with pitchforks yelling, “you’re not wanted here!” Here is one of her stacked vessels, “Home Flower Vase.”

I love the movement created by the small carving marks that make up the background of the piece. To see more of Kathy’s work, visit her website. FYI, for interested parties, Kathy is teaching a workshop on these stacked vessels at Arrowmont this summer! I noticed this when I was scoping the schedule, considering applying for a summer internship again this year. Here’s more information on the class.

That same year I took Kathy’s workshop, I also had the opportunity to go to NCECA with ceramics club at Truman State. (NCECA is a giant annual conference for ceramics people, clay heaven basically.) There I was introduced to the lovely work of Karen Newgard. Karen is also a sgraffito artist, currently living and working in Asheville, NC. Her work is inspired by her family home, patterning in nature, and Southern Folk Art. I love all of Karen’s work, but especially her jars. Here are two delicious examples:

“Tall Bird Jars”

“Botanical Jar”

To see more, visit Karen’s website. She has a particularly interesting section called “Pottery Process,” showing a step-by-step creation of her work. By now you all know how much I love process photos!!

So get ready, people. I plan to go sgraffito crazy until I get this raku kiln up and running. So far I have already busted one very well loved carving stylus in this experiment and the second one is on its last legs. Don’t worry, though, there are more tools on the way (thanks, mom!) I am also taking lots of photos for you so as soon as experiment #1 gets through the kiln, you can expect to hear all about it! For now, here is a little sneak peek:

Until next time!

Hey everyone! Just wanted to let you know about that annoying popup that has been persistently bothering anyone who comes to my site. I know it’s there, and am currently taking steps to get rid of it. I need to change to a different web host, and that is a project in progress by my wonderful web designer, Kate Moore.

In the meantime, thank you for your boundless patience in visiting the site despite being hassled by the Popup from Hell. Love you all!

-Emily

Okay everyone, I have been just dying to show you my latest mosaic work! I couldn’t do it until now, though, because it was a Christmas present for my family and I didn’t want to ruin the surprise. The present has been opened now, so I can finally share my most ambitious mosaic to date with all of you!

Before that, though, I want to share some other exciting mosaic-related news. Cindy Fisher, who you may recall was the instructor I met at Arrowmont who got me all fired up about mosaics, has graciously invited me to assist her at a workshop at Penland School
of Crafts this summer! I will be there helping with her two-week mosaic course from June 8-22. I have never been to Penland before, but I have heard nothing but good about it and can’t wait to go! For those unfamiliar, Penland is a nationally known craft school, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. It’s similar to Arrowmont, hosting workshops taught by nationally known artists year-round.

Now, back to the mosaic. As I mentioned, this mosaic was intended as a Christmas present for my parents, who had a specific spot on their wall they complained was too bare. Getting the hint, I set out to make a mosaic for the spot.

The dimensions of this project were 18 x 24, larger than anything I had yet attempted. My parents, like me, are nature lovers, especially of birds and blossoms. I pulled out my big drawing pad and made a sketch of three chickadees on a dogwood:

Now, I wanted to do this mosaic in the indirect method, which involves laying the tiles (tesserae) down on sticky contact paper and then eventually attaching those tiles to cement board. This means that the side facing up when you lay the glass on sticky paper will eventually be the back, the side that gets stuck to the board. So, the face down sides of the tiles will end up showing, and the image will be reversed. I liked the image in this orientation so I traced a backwards copy of it to work from, so the final mosaic would have this same orientation.

After that was done, I began laying the tiles. Cindy taught me to always lay the foreground first, from the most detailed and important elements to the least. I figured the birds were the #1 item, so I began with them.

Notice the I’m laying the ridged back side of the vitreous tile face up, because this side of the mosaic will eventually become the back. It’s easy to forget this at the beginning and end up having to flip some tiles! Another helpful Cindy tip is putting the little white “shines” in the eye, to give them some life. Chickadees don’t really have a grey spot over their eyes, but I was forced to add one in order to differentiate the eye from the rest of the head.

Here’s the completed center bird. I wanted to give the impression of the wing and tail feathers being glossy, so I snuck some white tiles in.

The three birds, completed. Next I began on the blossoms:

I added lots of different colored green “crumbs” for the centers of the blossoms, and some subtle pinks for the tips. The most challenging part about the flowers was trying to portray them from all different angles, how they’d appear on an actual tree.

Here are the completed birds and blossoms. The only remaining foreground at this point were the branches and leaves, which were a very fast part to complete:

Next I deliberated for a long time about the background. It might seem like the background is the simplest part, but I actually find it to be the most challenging. Contrast is one of the most important parts of a mosaic, and I think movement is, too. So I kept those things in mind as I deliberated. If I just laid dark green tiles in the background like a row of bricks, I’d achieve neither one of these things, since the leaves and twigs would get lost in the dark green color, and the brick structure would take all the lovely organic-ness out of the foreground.

I wanted to give the impression that there were leaves and sky behind the dogwood tree, with all the shifting shadows and light that come through tree branches. I had a lot of dark colors in the foreground, so it became apparent that the background would have to be somewhat light so the birds would “pop.” here is what I began with: 

I laid some large pale green pieces to act as background leaf clusters. Then I added various blues, greens, and some ivory for the muted sunlight. But, something felt lacking. Then I realized: I had put in all highlights and no shadows. The background needed some strategically placed darker areas.

That felt much more satisfying. I eventually also began to add in some pinks, to help pick up the subtle pink tips of the dogwood blossoms. Here is the completed layout:

I’m still not sure I got the “shifting shadows on the leaves” effect, but I consider it a successful background overall. So, I prepared for the messy part: setting and grouting!

To set the tiles onto the cement backing board, I prepared some white thinset and spread it on the board with a notched trowel. Then I flipped the thinset-coated board onto the tiled surface. I don’t have any pictures of that for you, since it takes two hands to drop the board onto the tile and plus I didn’t want thinset on the camera. So use your imagination and we end up with this:

So now, the image has been reversed, and the smooth sides of the vitreous tiles are now showing. Obviously, we are in need of some grout, since the white color of the thinset is breaking up the image something awful.

I used medium gray grout for this image. Then, I painted the exposed border a nice warn green. Here’s the final result! 

No, that’s not what potters say after we hit our finger with a hammer. They’re glaze ingredients! Welcome to my post about the behind-the-scenes of glaze mixing and its challenges!

Okay so that sounds like a bit of a snooze, admittedly. But glazes are such a huge and important part of doing ceramic art. The chemistry of it can actually be quite fascinating . . . if at times frustrating. In my opinion, glazes are their own separate world demanding a considerable amount of knowledge, experimentation, and skill. Oh, and PRACTICE. In my relatively short career (I began my undergrad in 2004) I have already done literally hundreds of glaze tests. I once mixed and fired 60 tests in the hunt for a mere 6 colors.

So it was with trepidation and, I won’t lie, some amount of dread, that I embarked on the search for a set of glazes for my new studio home at The Kentucky School of Craft at Hazard Community & Technical College (HCTC).

I’m scheduled to teach several classes this fall, and I wanted a group of glazes that would allow my students lots of different options as far as color & surface texture goes. I also wanted a group of glazes that could coordinate well together if a student wanted to use more than one on a particular piece or set. I also wanted glazes that weren’t overly temperamental. Any potter can tell you horror stories of a temperamental glaze: too runny, too rough, comes out ugly unless fired precisely right, comes out ugly unless it’s applied with the exact perfect thickness, causes “blushes” on any pots next to it, bubbles, cracks, crawls . . . . yep, there are plenty of things that can go terribly, terribly wrong. In my opinion, finicky glazes have their place with professionals, but are more trouble than they’re worth in a school setting.

Now, before I go further I should mention that you can just buy ready-made glazes from ceramic supply stores. And plenty of people do, though it ends up being more expensive in the end. My school already had a considerable amount of raw materials on hand, and I have training in mixing. So off I went on a glaze recipe hunt!

Finding good glaze recipes is a lot like finding good food recipes. The best ones are often passed down heirloom style from mentors & masters, and the internet is a dubious source at best. Knowing this, I decided to take the safe route of getting my recipes from trusted sources. I pulled recipes from Ceramics Monthly, Mastering Cone 6 Glazes, and the wonderful ceramic artists Lana Wilson & Jason Bige Burnett. I had the immense pleasure of meeting them both this summer at Arrowmont. Lana is an amazing artist and educator who has written tons of helpful articles for potters. She was fond of telling us her ceramics “failure stories” at Arrowmont, which is a great help to us early career folks mucking through our first tries at things. Jason is one of the 2012-2013 Artists in Residence at Arrowmont. He has a great joie de vivre that you can see in his work. I definitely recommend checking out their art!

Really and truly experienced glaze-makers can formulate their own glazes, from scratch. Others use a formulation software. I’m no expert, nor do I own software, so I went with the “trusted source” method. Luckily, most potters share recipes freely, as we have a shared understanding of the challenges of the media. Lana, for one, has a  set of recipes for download right on her website. Plus, even using the same glaze, every potter’s work will still be different. Finally, as you’ll see later, even WITH using someone else’s recipe you can still come up with different results in the kiln.

So, I went to work in my glaze mixing lab. I always feel somewhat like a mad scientist in here: 

All of those containers you see lined up are full of raw glaze ingredients. Pretty much every ingredient comes in the form of a fine powder. Most are white or tan but if you look you can spot some red or black ones. Chrome Oxide is a bright, Oscar The Grouch green. I always have to wear a respirator to work with them. The bags on the left are what most powders usually come in, then I transfer some to the containers. On the tabletop on the right are my triple-beam balance and digital gram scale. Those funky white pipes are part of the room’s ventilation.

So I went to work, mixing and testing. Ultimately, I fired two batches of tests. I wanted to try the same glazes in two different kiln programs, because the speed at which the kiln heats and cools can affect the results dramatically. Annnnnnd . . .  here are the results!

I know this may not look like much, but it’s the result of nearly two months of hard work. The names of these glazes are:

(top row): Slate Blue, Caribbean Blue, Spearmint, Tenmoku Brown, Gunmetal Black (bottom row): G1214Z Matte Clear, White Satin, Kate the Younger Clear Gloss, Raspberry, Nutmeg.

I wish you could see & touch these in person because the surface textures just came out delicious. I did have a few results that came out different than what they were meant to look like, but I am actually happy with the results the way they are. The biggest head scratcher was the “Spearmint” from Mastering Cone 6 Glazes. It’s the center upper tile. It’s meant to look like this. What I actually got was a kind of yellowish leafy green color.

Turns out, the authors have an FAQ on their website addressing this very issue. One of the ingredients they used is kind of a wild card: it’s called Rutile. Rutile is a less pure form of Titanium Dioxide. It’s actually the stuff that’s responsible for the starburst effect inside of star rubies and sapphires like the famed Star of India. Because rutile is not that pure, it differs from sample to sample. I knew about this from my undergrad years when we had a glaze go “rogue” once because a new batch of rutile caused the color to shift. Mystery solved!

So there you have it, a glimpse into glaze making in all its crazy glory. Hope you enjoyed!

I frequently have the thought that the hardest part of making art is planning what to do. Once that’s done, then you get to do the fun part of actually creating it. I think I spent the better part of an afternoon thinking up and researching my plan for mosaic #2.

I’m not really a person who believes in spirit animals, but if I was, a fox would be mine for sure. So I knew I wanted to do a fox, but I wanted to put it in some setting that was sort of fanciful or mystical. Inspiration is an odd thing, and for some reason, “Hey Diddle Diddle” popped into my head and soon I had the image of a fox jumping over the moon.

Here’s my sketch:

You can see I’ve already taped the sticky paper down and began by laying down some of the facial features. Remember I always have to put the most intricate and important parts down first.

And were these little face pieces intricate! To move around pieces this small, I used tweezers and a dental scaler. Vitreous glass isn’t too bad but little stained glass shards can be SHARP! By the end of the class I had seventeen ( I counted) teeny tiny cuts from accidentally brushing my hand over them. Next time I’ll be more careful!

Visually, I really liked the fox jumping over the moon in a rightward direction, like in my sketch. But with indirect method mosaic making, you end up reversing the image in the end. But ah HA! The ever-resourceful Cindy had a simple solution to this problem: the Double Reverse Method. When I completed my layout, all I would need to do is stick a second sheet of contact paper over the top of the mosaic, rub vigorously to stick the tesserae down to it, then flip the mosaic over and peel off the original sheet of sticky paper. Brilliant!

The one and only challenge with double-reverse is the texture on the vitreous glass. The texture is on the back, and with double-reverse you naturally put the back sides of tiles down onto the sticky paper. But the bumpy, ridged texture on the backs of the vitreous pieces caused them to annoyingly wobble and even detach themselves when other pieces would bump them. So, I had to do a lot of delicate tweezer work to keep these wobblers in place.

Here I’ve added more pieces to the body. The colored bits are mainly stained glass (flat on both sides and NOT wobble-prone, thank goodness) while the black is vitreous. I had to do the feet twice, on my first attempt I made the toes comically huge:

My table-mate Maria and I had a good laugh about that. Good thing I was using the indirect method or my fox would have been stuck with clown feet.

After some more work, the fox body is done:

Then I proceeded on to the moon, the green grass, and the night sky. I was particularly excited to do a night sky because I was looking forward to getting all impressionistic and Van Gogh with it. There’s a mosaic Cindy made with a snowshoe hare in front of a beautiful night sky that was also an inspiration. If you go to this page and scroll about halfway down, you will see it, right underneath the penguins.

About halfway through the grass I realized that I had set up a really big challenge for myself. Because you see, grass is thin. Very thin, and long. So to make it look realistic I had to cut a bunch of really long, thin shards and stick them all down in a natural-looking way. But of course, pieces of grass crisscross each other all the time, so I was forever cutting the long shards in half so one of them could appear to cross behind another. To make matters worse, some of the pieces were vitreous glass, and their bumpy backs were making them tip over and wobble all over the place. Not to mention, I needed to put in a background of impressionistic night sky behind the grass, which meant I had to fill in the spaces between the shards with even smaller, more randomly shaped bits. OY. Maria was having similar issues with her own piece across the table from me, & we took to calling the teeny random pieces “crumbs.” The fact that we found this as hilarious as we did is a testament to how slap-happy the mind can get after tweezering tiny glass pieces all night long.

Anyhow, I worked hard, and filled in every tiny speck of space. One really important thing I considered while placing the tesserae was contrast. I needed to make sure each individual part of the drawing would stand out and “read,” rather than blending in with what was around it. One example is that I deliberately kept the night sky lighter around the fox’s black legs and feet, so that they wouldn’t literally vanish into thin air. Here is the final layout:

All that tweezering paid off. Now it needed to be set onto the board and grouted.

And voila! I picked black grout for this, to help keep the night sky nice and dark. I think it gave a nice air of drama and magic. Then I painted the margin of the hardibacker board midnight blue. I took this picture out in natural sunlight, which brightens up the colors a bit more than looking at it indoors.

Here is a close-up of that pesky grass section:

See those tiny turquoise crumbs? Yikes. And here is a close-up of the finished fox and moon:

People who have looked at this have told me that they see a fox drinking by a stream, or a fox jumping in a field with the moon behind it. I like that people have come up with different takes on the image. Do you have a different one?

I keep talking about making this post because I. LOVE. MOSAICS now and I can’t wait to tell you all about it! So I won’t! Wait to tell you, I mean. Here goes!

This post could also be titled Pictures Extraordinaire because, like some overly enthusiastic parent, I took about one hojillion photos of each mosaic as it slowly developed. Hopefully you will be just as interested as I was in seeing the fascinating way mosaics come together. If not, here is a really funny picture of a capybara you can look at instead.

My instructor for this class was the super-personable and talented Cynthia Fisher. She is a full-time mosaic artist, and her work is as intricate as it is gorgeous. You can check it out at her website. What I really loved most about Cindy was the down-to-earth and good-humored attitude she brought to the class. A lot of times with art-making, you find procedures that are finicky, complex, and rely on obscure and/or expensive materials and precise conditions. Not so with Cindy! She was all about finding the most accessible, affordable, and simplest ways to accomplish our goals. As a person who considers herself pretty practically minded, I found that totally refreshing. It also gave rise to a general atmosphere of camaraderie and fun in our classroom, which made the whole experience even better.

Coming over from ceramics, I’m used to my artistic process being finicky, time-sensitive, and breakable. But, as Cindy pointed out, one of the cool things about mosaics is: fundamentally, they’re already broken. I think the looser, more spontaneous way of working, without freaking out about the work’s fragility, was really liberating.

We began each mosaic with a preliminary drawing, that acted as a guide telling us where to place the tiles (or tesserae.) I drew a robin’s nest:

Now I had always thought of mosaics as a very planned process, because I was imagining that as you worked, you would glue each individual tessera down in place. That is one way to do mosaics, it’s called the Direct Method. But, Cindy’s technique is to lay a sheet of Frosty contact (sticky) paper over the drawing, sticky-side up. This way, when you lay the tesserae down, they are held in place by the sticky paper, but not so firmly that you can’t move them around. This let us be a lot more spontaneous and allowed for more editing of the design as we worked. This way is called the Indirect Method.

One important detail I had to remember with this method, though, is that the side of the design that is facing up will eventually become the back of the mosaic: it’s the side that gets affixed to the backing board. (There is one way around that but I’ll get to it in the next post.) So, I had to keep in mind that my final piece would be a mirror image of my drawing. This also meant that if any of the tesserae I was working with had a “front” and a “back” side (like mirror glass does), I had to remember to put the “front” side down on the sticky paper so it would be face-up in the end. *Whew!* Anybody else noticing a theme of stuff continually being in reverse in all my Arrowmont classes??

Anyhow, let me show you the tesserae we were working with! Cindy mainly focused the class on working with vitreous glass. It comes in little squares that are textured on one side, and smooth on the other. It’s semitransparent, with this almost grainy look to it. However, a lot of the students in the class were stained glass artists, and they brought stained glass scraps that they generously shared with everyone. Here’s a picture showing green vitreous tiles on the left and green stained glass fragments on the right:

Naturally, since Arrowmont has some of the most amazing and well-equipped studios anywhere around, they had all sorts of fancy glass grinders and cutters that cut the glass with water! Like, a super-powered jet of water! Glass newbie that I was, I was pretty amazed at that one. But, we mostly ignored all that expensive stuff and just used a pair of wheeled tile nippers, a tool that costs about $20. After chopping up a nice pile of glass bits, we were ready to lay down the tesserae!

Here is the beginning progress with the nest and leaves. If you look closely, you can see a mix of vitreous and stained glass pieces.

I learned from Cindy that I should always approach the mosaic by doing the more important and more intricate parts of the image first. That way, those bits get the clearest outline and definition in the finished piece, whereas the background can be allowed to get a little more random.

Here I’ve started laying in some of the background: some pale taupe tree branches and a blue sky. If you look around the outer edge of the image you can see where the Frosty contact paper is taped down to a piece of cardboard backing. My sketch is sandwiched in between the cardboard and sticky paper.

Annnnd here’s the finished layout!

Now the piece needed to be attached to the backing board (we used hardibacker board) with thinset. I used a notched trowel to spread some thinset on the board, then lowered the board down onto the mosaic. After it dried, I got to peel off the cardboard & contact paper and see my image reversed for the first time!!

Buuuut sadly I didn’t take a picture of that. I grouted it first, THEN took the picture!

TA-DAAA!!! I chose a medium gray grout color for this one, which really helped bring the image together. I also painted the “margin” of hardibacker board a fresh green color, and went out and took this photo in the natural sunlight.

Honestly, I was shocked that this came out as well as it did. I remember how my first pottery and sculptures looked, and comparatively, they were not nearly as pleasant as this! So with that unexpected success under my belt, I was hungry to make more mosaics!! I think the next one deserves its own post so stay tuned!

I’m all settled back in Kentucky and couldn’t be more excited to get into my new studio space! I was lucky enough to be offered the position of Artist in Residence for the School of Craft at Hazard Community and Technical College this fall.

So far, I have seen the studio but haven’t had a chance to set up yet. That should happen in the coming weeks. Can’t wait!!!! I will keep you all posted as progress is made!

I have one more Arrowmont post to share with you, about what was hands down the class that exceeded my expectations the most: mosaics! Honestly, I may have found another life passion to rival ceramics, books, volleyball, and cooking. Yes, that’s right. I was pretty impressed myself. Next time I should be able to tell you all about it!

The second week I was at Arrowmont, I took an encaustic painting class. Encaustic, for those unfamiliar, is essentially painting with hot wax. The instructor was encaustic painter and ceramic artist K Rhynus Cesark. Her crossover talents created a perfect learning environment for me and I was able to learn a lot of different approaches to encaustics, including painting on board, painting on ceramics, and casting with wax.

I think the most interesting photos I have are from the casting process, so I decided to share those with you. Luckily, if you recall from the last post I already had a ready-to-use plaster mold left over from my last class, which casts one half of an opened book. The clay book was “F” for Fox, so I decided on “R” for Rabbit for my wax book.

To begin the casting process, the plaster mold had to be soaked in water for about 25 minutes in order to ensure the eventual release of the cast wax. Otherwise you end up with wax permanently affixed to your mold. When the mold was ready, liquid hot wax was poured into the mold:

Now, I didn’t want the thing to be solid since that would use up an unnecessary amount of wax. And by the way, anytime in this post I say “wax,” what I am really referring to is “wax medium.” Which! I should mention! is beeswax mixed with damar resin: NOT just 100% beeswax as one might think. The resin helps the wax cure to a harder and more durable finish. However, its fumes are also toxic, so we had fans going constantly in a well-ventilated space. This is part of what made this process, while not imminently life-threatening, the most dangerous thing I attempted this summer. The other two factors were: 1) the hot wax is about 200 degrees F when you are working with it, 2) there was much handling of razor blades, and 3) we used propane torches!! Safety first!

I wish I had an ultra-cool picture of me working the blowtorch to show you but alas, I have no such photo. What I can show you is a profound piece of blowtorch wisdom brought to us by the metals class:

Anyhow, after casting several layers of wax into the mold to make a hollow page, I repeated the process to make the opposite page. Popped them both out and here’s our book:

But it still needed a back cover. So I cast a flat slab, manipulated it some with the aid of the aforementioned blowtorch and the heated flat griddle we all warmed our wax on, and attached it:

There’s a real, bonafide book in the background I used to help get it right. After the attachment it was time for the fun part: adding the rabbit design.

One of the really neat things about wax is its ability to grab onto images on paper. If you stick a drawn or printed image down on the wax and rub it in with a spoon, the image will actually transfer down onto the wax, due to the stickiness of the wax layer. It’s reminiscent of the silly-putty newspaper transfers I did as a kid. The caveat is that certain types of printer ink work better than others, and we had a whole run-around with that at the workshop, going all over Arrowmont’s campus to find the ideal printer for wax transfers. It also turns out that regular pencil graphite from a sketch transfers beautifully. I sketched my rabbit drawing on onionskin paper and transferred it on.

Here you can see a close up of the rabbit’s back in graphite, as well as the coordinating clover I drew up in the top right corner. You can see here that I’ve already started carving each individual clover into the wax.

That brings us to the next step: the carving and filling process! In ceramics we have a similar technique called mishima, so I kept thinking of this as mishima on wax. I used the guidelines of my transferred sketch to thoroughly carve out each element of the drawing. Then, using black oil paint and black encaustic paint, I filled in the carvings. It looks a mess initially because when you apply the black paint it just goes all over the place. Eventually, you scrape the excess back with a flat edge razor blade and reveal the design. Here’s a photo where I’ve just begun the scraping process, so you can see scraped and un-scraped areas:

Finally, after all the carving and scraping is done, we have the final product!

We interrupt the entry I was supposed to do next to say: Goodbye, Arrowmont!! It’s my last day here this summer and I’m truly sad to go. It really couldn’t have been a better experience and I will definitely never forget it!!

On that note, here is a silly picture of everyone I worked with this year. (I’m in the back right doing a crazy arm pose.) It’s been, great, everyone!