Guilt

 I always feel vaguely guilty when I skip a Saturday Market while I'm still in town. It's like I'm playing hooky, cutting classes (which I only ever did once in seven years of college, undergraduate and grad school. Too responsible; or possibly too Catholic…).

But I really needed to fire this kiln today, so we could unload it on Monday, sort the pots Tuesday and load up the van to leave for Anacortes Wednesday morning. 

We talked about doing both. If the firing was perfect and predictable, I could go down at 5:30 am and start turning up the burners, have the body reduction finished before I went over to Market to set up at 7:30, swing by Farmer's Market at 9:00, then go back and tend the kiln until finished, with a break at 5:00 to help Denise pack up and take down the booth again. She's more than qualified to sell for me; she's been doing it for years.

The problem is with that word: predictable. In my experience, this kiln is anything but. If I don't set the burners high enough overnight, I won't have body reduction early in the morning, so it'll conflict with set-up. Even if body reduction times perfectly--say, cone 08 is going down as I come in the door--that's no guarantee the firing will end on schedule. My last few firings have ended between 5:30 and 9:30 pm. I could work around the latter--just come back to the studio after sending Denise home--but our takedown usually lasts from Market's end at five to about ten past six, exactly the time I should be in the studio watching the cones drop.

So, after much discussion, we decided to let Market go for the day. I still went down to pick up produce, but parked on the other side of the Park Blocks, so nobody would spot me sneaking in. And spent the rest of the day being diligent and productive: mixing glazes, chipping and washing a kiln shelf, cleaning the studio floor.

Oh, and working on this--

Brushing iron oxide onto Clever Girl, then wiping it off again, to emphasize skin texture.

Making book, part deux

 Now that Clever Girl is bisque-fired, it's time to consider surface treatment. The dino herself is simple, if messy: Wax over the colored porcelain eyes, teeth and tongue. Iron oxide wash, brushed on and sponged off again to leave traces in the creases and crevices. (Leaving me red-handed for the next several days, worse than cooking beets.)  Maybe some white underglaze on the belly, white stripes across the spine. 

The book needs content, though. I impressed the title into the spine--The Big Book of Dinosaurs--but intentionally left the pages blank. Since my head-canon is that my velociraptor thinks it's a cookbook, I need her to be perusing the herbivores. These two are sufficiently close, alphabetically. Also fun to draw. Here's the process.


Beginning with the blank page, first define the border of the illustration, then draw the dinosaur. Letter in the heading, then use a grey wash to greek-type the body copy.

Turn the page and repeat. Next, I brushed wax resist over the edges of the page block, then brushed a chrome oxide wash onto the cover, sponging back a bit, which leaves extra color in the canvas texture, and especially in the rubber-stamped title in the spine. The result looks astonishingly like the green, cloth-bound books of my grade-school library.

Final results. Well, semi-final; the firing will probably tone down and darken the colors considerably. We'll just have to wait and see.