I’ve always been a bit fascinated with sgraffito (Italian for scratching. The process can be simple or quite complicated. It’s basically painting a contrasting underglaze or slip on a piece of clay, and then scratching away part of the underglaze/slip to reveal the clay, creating a picture or design in the process.

So, here are several examples of sgraffito. Beginning with a black underglaze on a white clay body, I scratched the black away to reveal the white clay underneath (owl and farm animals). Then, I tried a dark clay body with a white underglaze (girl and flowers). Finally, I applied an underglaze transfer on white clay and scratched it away (cat and blue girl).

By the way, these are all wall plaques.  As always, click on a photo to enlarge it.

My piece, “Forest Nymph”, has been accepted into the Creative Arts Center of Dallas’ 2018 Annual Juried Membership Exhibition.

Created of clay and glaze, and highlighted with metallic leaf, this forest nymph sleeps in the dappled sunshine, dreaming of adventures past and follies yet to come. The inspiration for this piece is fairytales, legends and a bit of Shakespeare (perhaps Puck).

Opening reception for the show is August 4th from 5:30 pm – 8:30 pm at the Mary Tomás Gallery, 1110 Dragon Street, Dallas, TX.  The exhibition ends September 1st.

Every so often, my closets become crowded and it’s time to thin out things. I’ve toyed with the idea of having a “pottery only” garage sale but that seems like too much work. Instead, I decided to put load up a table with odds and ends and offer it FREE!!

We live on a fairly busy street; and there’s often foot traffic, too. So, here’s the table at the beginning of the day. No one actually stopped their car to gather up FREE pottery but a couple of neighbors came over and selected pieces. At the end of the experiment, half the pieces had new homes and the rest were wrapped up and put into a box for a charity drive.

Note: I didn’t actually sit and monitor who was coming by and looking.  I was surprised by what pieces were chosen and what pieces were left.

I’ve been working on a couple of ideas and wanted to see how they’d work in various clay bodies and glazes.

This first set is the Sea Life series.  (You can click on the photos to see a larger version.)

It began with the pot on the left that I created in class at Brookhaven College.  I was going for tubular growth/sea life and wanted it to be pristine.  So it was made of a cone 10 white clay (Trinity Ceramics T-Mix10) and I was planning on using a white glaze on it.  Well, I couldn’t find the white glaze; so, I dipped it in “Snow”.  Now, you’d think that a glaze called “Snow” would be white, wouldn’t you??  It’s  more gray than white but, actually, I like it better, especially the white tips on each tube.

Next, I built Sea Life: Gulf using a cone 6 red stoneware.  Then, it was glazed with Lapis Satin, Gun Metal Green and Copper Blue (Coyote glazes). The  glazes ran together; I like the result.

Finally, there’s Sea Life: South Pacific.  The clay is a black (actually dark brown) cone 6.  And, before the bisque firing, I coated the tips of the tubes with a slip/silicon carbide mixture.  You can’t really tell it’s on the pot until you add glazes and refire it.  Glazes are Matt Bronze Green all over, then Copper Blue (Coyote) sprayed on and Sea Salt (Mayco) dabbed on.   Love it!  Gotta try more of that.

Next, I wanted to try new shapes; so, I created tarpaper templates and these pots are the result of that experiment.

The main body of the pots are glazes with Coyote’s oil spot glazes.  The one on the left is Brick/Marshmallow; the one on the right is Licorice/Marshmallow.  The top/bottom accent sections are glazed with Coyote’s White Crawl.  Interesting but need to play with these concepts and glazes a bit more.