Bank Shot

Spent much of Tuesday and all of Wednesday making animal banks: Cats, pigs, elephants, tyrannosaurs. I used to do nearly two dozen different banks, including one-off special orders. Now days I limit myself to eight: pig, elephant, cat, hen, frog and three kinds of dinosaurs: brontosaur, stegosaur and tyrannosaurus rex (my predatory lending bank). (Retired patterns: dog, bear, blue whale, orca, shark, walrus, duck, beaver, rhino, hippo, triceratops, cow, bison, rabbit; by special order I've done giraffe, monkey & possum.)

They're surprisingly time-consuming: Throw all the bodies (and heads, with the dinosaurs) on the potter's wheel, sculpt in faces on the cats, leave them on the ware boards to firm up.

Sit on the sofa with a bag of clay and a couple of tupperware boxes, making ears, toes, tails and eyebrows while watching television--I find Face Off on Syfy to be inspirational. Those folks can sculpt! Go back to the studio before bed and cut teeth into the T. rex heads; they'll be too stiff to open the jaws in the morning.

Fortunately, even on hot summer days in Oregon, it's cool and damp overnight. I can leave pots uncovered--or lightly draped in plastic--and they'll be leather hard by morning.

The next day it's time to come back and start putting things together. Smooth off throwing marks, cut holes for coin slot and easy-withdrawal stopper. Score and slip and attach eyebrows, ears, toes. Attach dinosaur heads to bodies, then realize I haven't made legs yet, so set them aside on bubble wrap and pinch out T. rex drumsticks. Load up the extruder and shoot out coils in two sizes, for elephant and pig legs and cat tails.

The eyes, cat tongues and elephants trunks are all colored and uncolored porcelain, and no matter how I tight I wrap it, it's dried out again. So I have to slake it down with hot water, drain off the surplus, pour the slurry onto a plaster slab. Then I have to fuss with it, turning it over onto a dry spot, scraping up spots where it's getting too dry, all while continuing to add bits to banks.

Everything seems to dry at different rates, so I'm jumping from animal to animal, cat heads first, then dinosaurs, then over to pigs, then back to cat tails and feet. Wrap the elephants tight because I can't start on them until porcelain is ready for tusks. It's a monster of multi-tasking, which is not my favorite thing. It seems I'm never going to finish everything, until suddenly, I have.

At around quarter to twelve, the last pink tongue and blue eye is on, and I can stumble off to bed. Tomorrow I'll make something simple, like teapots.

Why do I still do them? They don't sell that well. I can't wholesale them, because $40 retail is the bare minimum I can charge for them with all the time I put in, and about the maximum people are willing to pay. I can't believe I used to ask $20 for them, twenty years ago.

The thing is, though, they attract attention. I put them in the front of the booth, where they'll make eye contact with people, make them stop and look. Sometimes they say "Cute" and walk on. Sometimes they look at the rest of the booth. Sometimes they buy things.

Sometimes it's even a bank.