Blackberry Lane Pottery News

Rookwood Faience

2011-08-03T08:29:00.016-04:00

Fountain of the Water Nymph, 1913

As promised, here are some of the pictures of the Rookwood architectural faience. The fountain in this first picture was originally installed in the Rookwood showroom and was displayed there until the company was relocated to Mississippi in 1960. When the Cincinnati facility was dismantled the fountain was purchased by a real estate developer and installed in a bowling alley, of all places! And here I thought I was brave displaying ceramic horses in a house with young boys. At least I didn't have to worry about someone tossing a bowling ball.

The fountain is actually made of tiles, which is obvious in this photo. The woman is a separate figure set on a tile base and added to the composition. I found this concept fascinating. I have concepts drawn out for future projects that involve sculptural tiles that fit together like a puzzle, but it never occurred to me that the tiles did not have to assemble across a flat surface, or that three-dimensional sculptural elements might be added.

Here is a detail shot of the bas relief pieces on the back. I wish I had taken more detail shots of all of these pieces!

Chimneypiece, 1903

This mantel was a custom design done on commission. At the turn of the last century a simple stock mantel of fairly plain tiles could be ordered for $8.75 (that's $166 in modern dollars), and an elaborate one with mantels, brackets, shelves and bas relief tiles could cost as much as $210 (equivalent to almost $4000 today).

I found this interesting because my first bas relief, the Celtic Pony, was designed for the corners of my own fireplace. He never was installed because I realized I needed to do a reverse design for it to look right on the two sides. Oh, to have the time to design a whole mantel of pony tiles!

This next piece was a carved wooden mantel created for Rookwood in 1851, the childhood home of Maria Longworth Nicols Storer, founder of the Rookwood Pottery. It isn't ceramic, of course, but I thought it was interesting to see how fine craftsmanship was a part of her upbringing.

Angels, 1920

I found these two pieces interesting because they are such large ceramic castings. They are apparently the only two ever made from the mold, and were done for the Seventh Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. They were among the things that survived unharmed the 1970 that destroyed the church, although the glaze was slightly discolored.

The description card stated that the angel had been sculpted in clay and then cast with a "multi-part plaster mold". I have to imagine the angels were themselves assembled from pieces, too. I'd hate to think how heavy those molds would have been wet, or how difficult the greenware would have been to transport. Of course, it makes it easier when your kiln is big enough to sit a dinner party!

The other thing that was striking about the Rookwood Pottery pieces on display was how very different the ceramic world was at that time. The pottery rose to fame largely through wins at competitions for ceramics. The idea of high-profile competitions for ceramic products was interesting in itself, but even more so because the items were cast. That is, at least in the modern ceramic world, just not done. Cast ceramics are not considered a legitimate art form in that community. I have always thought that was a shame because relegating casting to the ceramic ghetto is a big reason why ceramic mold-making is a dying art. What I didn't realize is that it wasn't always that way, so perhaps there is hope that one day the skill involved will be appreciated again.

A visit to Rookwood

2011-08-02T09:40:00.008-04:00

It has been quiet here on the studio blog while I get the horse color book ready for publication, but I wanted to share a recent trip to the old Rookwood Pottery while I had a moment. I'll apologize up front for the poor quality of the pictures, but all I had was my cell phone. I was kicking myself for not packing the good camera!

Rookwood was an influential ceramics company around the turn of the last century that played a big role in the development of art pottery. As someone who has always been attracted to the Arts & Crafts Movement - both aethestically and philosophically - I had long admired their pottery. That was why my husband, back when we were newly married, suggested that we have dinner at The Rookery while visiting his home town of Cincinnati. It was the restaurant that used the old pottery building.

The restaurant closed shortly after that, so I was thrilled to learn that it had recently reopened as The Rookwood Bar & Restaurant. My sister-and-law and I had lunch there, and I took the picture above of one of the brick bottle kilns that are situated throughout the dining area. There are dining tables inside each of the kilns, but unfortunately my camera was not able to capture them. Here is a good image of one.

These are the buildings that once housed the pottery. The buildings are located in Mount Adams which overlook the city of Cincinnati. It is a lovely setting.

This is one side of the ornate gates that sit at the entrance to the old pottery buildings. Both sides are topped with the same sculpture of nesting rooks. There is a small fountain off to the side with more rooks, too.

I was also able to see an exhibit at the local art museum on Rookwood faience, or glazed architectural terra cotta. (Ceramics seem to like to assign the same term for different things, just to keep things interesting. Faience is also a type of tin-glazed earthenware pottery, but Rookwood produced the former kind of faience.) I took quite a number of pictures, though not as many and not as detailed as I would have liked due to camera limitations. I plan to post those separately, since there are technical aspects I'd love to talk about here.

I also picked up a fascinating book, though I suspect it might be a while before I have time to do more than peruse it.

I find the Rookwood story interesting because, like most of the ceramic companies in the equine collectibles industry, it was started by a woman who initially created the items as a hobby. There are other parallels as well, like the fact that Rookwood initially offered its wares as bisque for others to glaze, and that the company made its name through success through competition. I often think the ceramic community that I am a part of is a bit odd in relationship to the rest of the ceramic world, but in some ways it seems that we aren't odd... we are a revival!

Adventures in self-publishing

2011-06-30T08:36:00.009-04:00

(I am cross-posting this from my horse color blog, since it explains why things have been so quiet here - and might stay quiet for a little while longer.)

That’s the print test that arrived late last night. It came with some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that I will not be able to get books printed in time for BreyerFest, which was my original goal. I knew that was probably a long shot because it was unlikely that everything would turn out perfectly on the first try. Technology has changed a lot since I was last involved in printing, but I was pretty sure that part of it was still the same. Things always go wrong at the printers. Always.

I knew I was looking at a lot of different quality issues, which is why I sent off a sample section to be printed. That’s what I am holding in the picture. (That’s why it is a small, saddle-stitched booklet, rather than a perfect-bound 430+ page book.) I did not know what to expect from the newer Print-On-Demand (POD) technology. I wasn’t even sure I would go that route, because some of the issues I had been told to expect gave me pause. Ideally I would prefer to go that route because I would love to hand off the fulfillment aspect over to another entity so I can return to the studio. Places that do that (companies like Lulu and Createspace) all use the same print-on-demand technology.

What I had heard was that that the color printing, which is used on the covers, leaves something to be desired. That one issue, paired with the still-high costs involved, is why this particular set of books are being designed in black and white. An expensive book with questionable color was a non-starter. I must admit that while it is not the same as offset printing, and I suspect their press wasn’t calibrated well (too much magenta), it wasn’t as awful as I had been lead to expect. It is the kind of compromise I expected with Print-On-Demand. (And yes, I know… a book about color in black and white? I’ll talk more about that later in the post.)

But it was the black and white interior where I found the problems.

Oh, that won't do at all!

Despite meticulously following the instructions for “best results”, many of the photos and illustrations came out too dark. I don’t need color to show how unusual the patterning is on the Hackney in that first photo, but I do need people to be able to see the pattern!

The same image using a wide range of level and curve adjustments

The remedy is to go in and tweak the problem images in Photoshop and print another test to determine which settings will work best. It still amazes me that this is actually economically feasible for a printing company, but it is apparently how it is done.

There was some good news that came out of my test, though. As I mentioned, these books are being printed in black and white. Part of that is the economics, but part is also the subject matter. As I have said before, these are not “how to identify you horse’s color” books. Until color printing becomes more accessible, that kind of information is far better suited to a place like this blog. Instead, these books are about the history of horse color in different breeds. In many ways, they are as much about the history of the different breeds as they are about color specifically. As a result, a large portion of the photos are already black and white because they are old. For some all we have are engravings (like the horse in the image above).

Those images are really important to properly tell these stories, but in many cases the image quality is really poor. Often the sole remaining image of a historical animal is the one that was printed in a stud book. Stud books were often printed fairly cheaply on paper little better than newsprint. For others, the pictures come from old periodicals or bulletins issued by agricultural departments. Those were the images that motivated me to print a test section, because I needed to know if they could be included. With modern pictures I have the option of contacting owners and photographers for an alternate, but for the historic horses often there is only one (bad!) image. If that one image didn’t work, I might need to formulate another plan. But ironically, the bad photos printed well. In some cases, far better than they should have! So while the fix for the dark photos is going to be time consuming, at least there is a fix.

The other great irony?

This was easier to do. When I first announced that there would be books, I had a lot of people ask if they would be offered as e-books or downloads. I said I would try, but I really wasn’t sure that I was up for a great technical challenge like that.

Oddly enough, getting the manuscript into Kindle format was really simple. In fact the biggest challenge wasn’t technical, but one of layout. How could I break down the charts and diagrams (like the one those sample homozygous splash overos came from) so that they worked with that kind of format? That is actually a lot more fun than figuring out levels and curves and file formats! And since I own a Kindle, it is easy to see exactly what my readers will get. I am also told that if I use color images, those devices that can do color will show them in color. That might be the answer for color publishing in the future. So yes, there will be an electronic version eventually. After I figure out how to make the less high-tech version work for me!

BOYCC Report - Workshops

2011-05-26T20:04:00.006-04:00

One of the coolest aspects of the BOYC Convention was the wide range of workshops that were offered. I have attended stand-alone workshops before, but the convention was unusual in the sheer number that were offered. Pretty much every aspect of producing ceramic horses was covered, so that attendees could sample what was involved with each step.

These first two pictures were taken during the Custom Glazing Workshop, which was held on Thursday at Pour Horse Pottery. Participants were given their choice of either an Animal Artistry Dartmoor or Friesian Mare. They masked the markings and patterns, and selected the color for Joan and Addi to airbrush. After that the horse was returned to them for detailing.

Here is my roommate Katie Gehrt with the Dartmoor that she was glazing dapple grey. Joan airbrushed the basic color and Katie erased the dapples and painted the details. All the horses were fired and ready to take home on the last day of the show. Joan even supplied boxes and packing material, as well as offering to ship the horses home for anyone that could not carry them. Talk about full service!

That was a workshop for underglazing, which is the method I use to glaze my own work. The other method is china painting, which is completely foreign to me. For that reason I was really looking forward to taking the workshop on China Painting with Karen Gerhardt. I will post about that separately in the future, because it really deserves a separate post.

There was a two-part workshop on restoration that I would have loved to have attended, but fitting a repair victim in my overstuffed luggage was out of the question after I decided that "Elvis" needed to travel with me. There was also a demonstration on how to pour and clean greenware, which was a lot of fun to watch, since I remember that part of my own ceramic education so well! (No one at BOYCC broken nearly as many legs as I did when I was learning.)

But the coolest set of workshops, in my opinion, were done as a pair. On Friday Kelly Savage gave a workshop on sculpting a simple medallion. Throughout the show on Saturday, a small group of folks worked on their medallions. That was because on Sunday, Margaret Olson of MAO Ceramics gave a workshop on simple moldmaking.

Here are some of the participants making plaster waste molds of their medallions.

(And on a completely unrelated note, the woman in the red shirt is Amy Peck. I've been privileged to call Amy a friend for many years, but my time at BOYCC gave me a whole new appreciation for the level of organization that Amy has. Much of the messy logistics of the convention were handled by her, and she did so with such competence and grace that I was left in awe.)

Here are four of the medallions ready for the lids to be poured. I especially liked that there was a strawberry daiquiri there in the picture, complete with fruit kabob and drink umbrella. The husband of Elli Heritage-Mench, Gunner, kept the Hospitality Suite stocked with mai tais and daiquiris made from fresh, locally-grown strawberries. (The amber liquid in the cup next to the daiquiri is mold soap - an important distinction to remember while moldmaking!)

This full slate of workshops was the part of BOYCC that had me most intrigued when Joanie first explained the concept. As is probably apparent to anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time, sharing techniques is really important to me, and I would love to see this kind of concept take off within the model horse community. Blog posts and articles can convey a lot of information, but there is nothing like handling the materials in person alongside someone who already knows how to use them. It is certainly true of ceramics, but I also think the same kind of format would work well for the other artisan activities like sculpting, casting, prepping and painting.

BOYCC Report - Banquet Dinner

2011-05-25T20:43:00.010-04:00

Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig's table, with an inset photo of the two of the magnets she gave to each of her guests.

I have always thought that the equine collectibles community should tinker with the format of our shows, and I've tried to support those shows that did. Bring Out Your Chinas has always been a trendsetter when it came to specialty shows catering to ceramic collectors, but this year was something else entirely. Joan and Addi envisioned something entirely different in concept as well as format; a true convention experience. Because there were so many innovative things about the weekend, I wanted to highlight them in separate posts.

One of the most unusual things about BOYCC compared to other shows was that meals were part of the event. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were provided to the participants for each day of the event. Usually these were held at the host resort, in restaurant that looked over the lake. The windows in the picture above show the view we had of the water. It was a lovely setting with abundant natural light for viewing the pieces on display.

On Saturday there was a Banquet Dinner where awards were given for the previous day's competition. It was a great way to truly appreciate the horses and owners, rather than just catching snippets of the announcements while actively showing or judging.

The other unusual aspect of the Banquet was that we were arranged at Artist Tables. Artists who worked in ceramic were invited to host a table. This involved creating a centerpiece that would then be taken home by one of the guests. It was open-ended, with no real requirement about what could be done. I must confess that I came up blank on ideas when I was approached, and suspected that I'd be kept too busy with the name tags to do the idea justice, so I declined to take a table. It was a wise choice, because I would have felt quite the slacker compared to the efforts the artists gave their tables!

The top picture is of Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig's table. The creation of her centerpiece was detailed on her blog. Entrants were asked for table choices, but I didn't have a preference. I figured I would spend most of dinner fretting about my presentation (which followed immediately afterwards), so my only request was that I be seated with fun people. The room was full of those, so I couldn't go wrong no matter where I was, but Sarah's was my assigned table.

One of the things I loved was how well each of the tables reflected the artist who decorated them. This one was for Adalee Hude of Brightly Hude Studio. The butterflies and chocolates sit in a pottery bowl decorated with vintage illustrations. Each of the guests received a hand-painted ceramic pin with a bird. (Click the photo to go to Addi's website.)

Donna Chaney of Animal Artistry had a delicate diorama of an Arabian mare and foal, all in ceramic. Each guest received a custom glazed chess piece. (Living in a house full of chess players, I went away dreaming of a custom glazed chess set of my own - perhaps Pintos and Appaloosas instead of Black and White. Unlike my sons I play pretty poorly, but at least I would enjoy looking at the pieces while I lost!)

This one was from Joan Berkwitz of Pour Horse Pottery. That is an Otto that has been turned into a tea pot. He has a wrapped wire handle and a lid cut into his back, as well as a pour spout through his mouth. A Collier has been turned into a creamer, and a Limerick into a sugar bowl. Joan's guests received Pour Horse pins glazed to match the tea set.

This was the table beside me, and probably my favorite. It was for Karen Gerhardt of Wizard's Vale Arts. Karen went all out with a claybody custom Boreas as her centerpiece. Each of her guests received a smaller Boreas that had been art glazed (each a different color). I loved that Karen brought a bit of her home in Colorado to her table, with evergreen bows, pine cones and photos of the mountains.

Kristina Lucas-Francis had a table done like a Tiki Bar, complete with a Tiki Rex in an aqua green glaze. (For those more familiar with her work on horses, Kristina also sculpts dinosaurs.) Her guests each received a glazed Bucky pins that matched the Tiki Rex.

This was the table for Marge Para of ReMuda Pottery. Marge handbuilt the pot that was her centerpiece, but in each chair was a gift box that contained a different hand-thrown pot. They made me wish I had taken the wheel throwing class offered at the local clay shop earlier this year.

Of all the concepts that Joan talked about while the convention was in its planning stage, this one - artist tables - was the one that gave me pause. Ours is a community with conflicted feelings about the celebrity of its artists, and I worried that dedicating tables to individuals might be awkward. Oddly enough, the tables did not focus attention on the artists, but rather allowed the artists to focus on their customers. Perhaps it was the format of the artist as "host" and the collectors as "guests", and the gifts for each person there. It seemed much more like an appreciation of those who allow us to do what we love, rather than a recognition of some kind of status.

BOYCC Report - Swag!

2011-05-25T14:07:00.012-04:00

There is so much I want to share about the recent Bring Out Your Chinas Convention (BOYCC). The format was an experiment conceived by Joan Berkwitz of Pour Horse Pottery and Addi Hude of Brightly Hude Studio, and there is so much to say about it that it will take several posts (and a few more days of sleep for my part).

I did want to share some photos of the "Swag Bags", which are pictured above. Those are actually the Day 1 Swag Bags. So many things were created as giveaways for the show that a second set of bags were required for the second day of the show! My own contribution - the handmade name tags discussed in previous posts - were actually handed out separately so that we didn't have to match the bags to their owners. It was work enough just filling all the bags!

Here are a few of the items: a ceramic mug with one of the early Pour Horse logos. The roll of blue cloth is a lint-free towel for cleaning dust and debris from ceramics; these were extremely handy for those of us who took the workshop in china painting! The retractable white brush in front came from Kristina Francis. To the right is a memory book for attendees to sign. It was one of my favorite things from the event, although I am sorry that judging kept me too busy to sign as many as I wished.

More swag! From the top left there is a cartoon pony keychain (my son already claimed it) and a plastic piggy with tiny dominos (again, claimed by my kids). The white paw prints are handmade soap, and they sit on a handmade koozie. There is a pen that reads "playing with mud" and a key fob that says "BOYC". To the lower left are some index cards for last minute show entries (boy was I glad for those!). Sitting on top of those is one of Karen Gerhardt's pins in a pretty lavender porcelain. We used the same pin in glossy white for her overglazing workshop. (Mine is, not surprisingly, so far from done that there is no point in photographing it yet.) The two small buttons were done by Melissa Gaulding. She made enough for everyone to trade, and I ended up with two appaloosa foals. I am still kicking myself for not taking the time to find someone willing to trade the splash overo one.

Lynn Fraley of Laf'n Bear sent some of her bear tiles. I really liked the blue-green glaze on this one.

Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig included one of her Dancing Horse tiles. Sarah sent a truly staggering number of tiles for gifts and awards. I was lucky enough to win several of them, and will include pictures in later posts about the show and Saturday night's award dinner. I am afraid all they did was succeed in making me greedy for more of them, so I hope that she stocks some in her Etsy store soon. (hint, hint)

Another big hit from the swag bags were these candy parrots, made by Jen Kroll. She did a number of different color patterns and I was fortunate to take quite a few home. I didn't have the heart to eat them, though.

I couldn't eat these, either. Liz Holm donated custom-printed M&Ms with "BOYC 2011", "Shiny!" and a silhouette of the HR Morgan Stallion. I didn't know that could be done, but here is the site for ordering them.

I didn't have to eat them, though, because the bags were filled with all manner of snack foods - and that was on top of all the meals that were provided as part of the event.

And finally there was this guy. He was part of the booty Sarah sent down for the show. I had seen them on Sarah's blog post and coveted them. My roommate Katie Gehrt won this one (my favorite!) as a door prize and gave him to me. It made my day! He sat next to my laptop during the horse color presentation, so that I would see him each time I changed a slide. It was almost like having Sarah right there, which of course made it impossible to be nervous.

I will post more about the workshops and the show and the presentation in the next few days. I want to tell as much as possible about BOYCC in hopes that more people will consider using it as a template for future events.

Almost time to go

2011-05-14T05:34:00.004-04:00

I leave for Bring Out Your Chinas in just a few days. Now that the presentation and the name tags are done, I am starting to get excited. Joanie and Addi have come up with a very different format for an equine collectibles gathering, and I cannot wait to see how it turns out.

I know I am particularly interested in seeing how this guy turned out. He's going to be one of the table centerpieces for our meals. Different ceramic artists are sending special centerpieces, which will be fun to see. I am going to try to post the different ones here.

In fact, it is my hope that I'll be able to do some live blogging from the event. If there is a reliable internet connection there at the convention center, I will try to send pictures and posts.

What was I thinking??

2011-05-13T14:30:00.001-04:00

When my husband and I joined our church, we were given name tags. They weren't the ordinary printed kind; instead someone had painstakingly embroidered each of our names alongside the shield that is the symbol for our denomination (Episcopalian). It was a very personal gesture of welcome that we, having only recently moved to the area, really appreciated.

So when it came time to come up with an idea for the Bring Out Your Chinas Convention swag bag, I wanted to do something that would give the participants that seem feeling of personal welcome. I am really good with the idea of welcoming.

I am not so good with numbers. Or estimating time. It's not like a didn't know there would be forty or so participants, which would mean designing and coloring forty cards. In the past I have shied away from Trading Card swaps because I wasn't sure I could finish the two or three cards required. Yet for some strange reason I just didn't think much about the scale of this a project. Needless to say, I really know what forty or more cards means now!

Still it was a fun break from my ordinary work. The horses (and a few dogs) are mounted on patterned or textured cardstock, and I got to play with colors that I don't usually get to use - like Jackie Arns-Rossi's card with the spring green background above.

This was one of my favorites of the group, done for fellow Collie person Mel Miller (her name is on the outside of the card holder).

The rest of them can be seen here. There are five pages in all, so look for the links at the bottom to take you to the next page.

A spaniel for Kelly

2011-04-15T15:03:00.003-04:00

Since Kelly Savage is coming all the way from England to help out at BOYCC, it seemed only fair to make a special card for her (see her comments from the previous post). Kelly, it's not a proper English Cocker Spaniel, but it is a Cocker Spaniel for your name badge!

Swag!

2011-04-14T12:37:00.008-04:00

When my friends Joan Berkwitz and Addi Hude began planning a true convention for the ceramic horse community, I knew I wanted to be involved. Joan had mentioned that they would be looking for donations for the "swag bag" that entrants received, and to be thinking of something I might want to do. I decided that we needed name badges. It seemed appropriate, because I'm a big believer in the idea that no one should feel like a stranger at a model horse gathering. But they couldn't be just any name tags. We needed artwork! And of course, if we were going to have artwork, all the horses needed to be cool colors. Lots of different colors.

I decided I would use lineart, which is common among those that enjoy two-dimensional horse art games. For the mock-up, I used Jacqueline Ferrigno's coloring book pages. For those that never outgrew coloring books, I highly recommend her site. That's him sporting leopard spots in the first photo.

That first badge was done last year, before I had the lineart prepared for the upcoming horse color book. Unfortunately my own artistic style isn't quite as romantic as Jacqueline's, but they do tie in with the presentation I will be giving at the convention. (The presentation is partially based on the contents of the book.)

When I did my sample, and the first few badges, the holders fit a 3 x 4 badge. That's the larger one at the bottom. Then when I returned to get more holders, the only kind available were smaller. I didn't realize this until I got them home, but they have the advantage of holding a card the same size as an Artist Trading Card. As a collector of those, I liked that idea so I decided to make the rest smaller. The top card is the smaller size. Hopefully no one will mind the inconsistency.

Here are some of the in-progress horses. They get cut out and pasted on the patterned paper backgrounds. It has been fun working with color again after months of focus on black and white book pages.

Here is a scan of one of the horses. No effort goes to waste around here; he's also an illustration in the upcoming book. I originally planned to color the book images digitally, but I found that the time saved on the repetitive parts was offset by how much longer it took me to do things. I suppose I am still a traditional artist at heart.

The horses were colored with Copic Sketch markers. I've always liked them, and for my last birthday my mother gave me this colorful box filled with them. I love their vibrant colors, and the brush tip (see the bottom marker) feels more like painting than coloring with a marker. And unlike my Intuos tablet, I can bring them with me to the beach next week. That's how I plan to spend Spring Break - sitting under the Spanish moss coloring little horse faces for my friends at BOYCC!

The book that ate my brain

2011-04-13T09:02:00.006-04:00

As an avid reader, I noticed that in the acknowledgments, authors almost always thanked their long-suffering family members. I routinely wrote articles and blogged, so I really wondered just how bad could it be? Now I know.

I had great hopes that I could juggle studio work while finishing the upcoming horse color book, and still continue to post to the blog. Obviously that has not been happening! Over the last few months, my world has narrowed down to just the one thing: the book. I do not multitask well at all because I tend to lose myself in whatever project is in front of me, but I must admit that preparing a book has taken that obsessive focus to a new level. I am fortunate that those around me have been very patient with my partial presence; some part of me is always working on the book.

I am getting closer to completion, although I suspect that what looks like the end is just the beginning as I begin to deal with the actual publication. Towards that end, I have begun assembling the necessary photographs and illustrations. Just a few weeks ago, I made a trip to the National Sporting Library in Virginia in hopes of securing better digitized images from some old stud books. It was one of the few equine libraries I had not yet seen, so I was excited about the prospect. The building, pictured above, is in the style of an old coach house, and contains over 17,000 volumes dating as far back as the 16th century. I went with some specific goals, so I only had the chance to skim the surface of what was available there.

Civil War Horse, bronze by Tessa Pullan (1996). The sculpture, which stands just a short way from the spot where the Battle of Middleburg (part of the Gettysburg Campaign) was fought, commemorates the more than 1.5 million horses and mules that died in the Civil War.

There were restrictions on taking photos in the upper levels of the library due to some of the artwork on loan, which was a shame. The interior is lovely, and gives the impression that you are visiting the personal library of some nineteenth-century Virginia gentleman.

But this is where I spent most of my time: the basement. Over the years I've learned that the really useful stuff is usually in the basement. This one was far, far nicer than most. The moving shelves in the picture hold most of the stud books in the collection. To get to the necessary aisle, the handles are turned and each case slides along a track to open a path. If only I had something like this in my house! (Lacking such fancy solutions, I have relied on the Kindle to make space for more books.)

I intended to get better copies of images that I already had, but I made a few finds while I was there. One of the best was a handful of images of the famed, but sadly extinct, Hanoverian Creams. This one came from a 1909 book on horse breeds. There is a great deal of mystery surrounding the actual color of the Creams, so finding a handful of images was an unexpected bonus.

Pistachio, one of the last living Hanoverian Creams

So progress continues on the book, albeit slower than I would like. I had hoped to have copies in time for the Bring Out Your Chinas Convention, but I have other projects that have to be done for that event (including the presentation there) that are going to require that I set the book aside for a bit, so I suspect that is not going to happen. My next big make-or-break deadline will be BreyerFest. I am much more optimistic about making that one.

In the meantime, I fear this blog may still be more sporadic than usual. I have gone ahead and set up the blog for the book, but it is only a placeholder at this point. It should go live once the book is well and truly off to the printers. That's also when I should return to the studio, and pictures of shiny ponies will once again appear here.

Articles on Pattern Interaction

2011-01-21T14:58:00.006-05:00

With the unfortunate passing of the Realistic Equine Sculpture Society, publication of the organization's newsletter The Boat has ended. The last issue was sent to members this past week.

Like so many readers, I eagerly looked forward to each issue. Twice a year we were treated to 200+ pages of in-depth information on everything remotely related to the business of realistic equine art. I benefited immensely from what others wrote, and I was flattered to be asked to contribute articles of my own.

When my friend Sarah (the tireless Boat editor) asked if I would do a regular column, she suggested that I write something more advanced that the usual "this gene does this" type of series. I jumped at the chance to explore a topic that I had only touched on briefly in previous seminars and articles, which was how the different patterns interact with one another. It's pretty esoteric stuff for real horse people, but for us as artists there aren't many aspects of horse color that are more useful. We need to know which interesting aspect of a reference can be realistically combined with a different pattern, because all of us do that a lot. Can this face marking go with that blanket pattern? If I decide to use grey as a background color instead of bay, what changes about the spots on my leopard? All of these are important questions for us, and I thought it would be fun to look at them from an artist's point of view.

I decided to start with the appaloosa patterns. I had not written extensively about them before, and there was a lot of ongoing research into them. There was a lot of potential for new discoveries. I also, as it turned out, had become the rather unexpected owner of a very loud appaloosa of my own.

Four installments of the series "Hoist the Colors" were published. A fifth is partially completed. Since the position of RESS was that the copyrights remained with the authors, I can republish the articles however I see fit. I decided to upload them to the website. The links for each one are:

Part 1 - Pattern Interaction Overview

Part 2 - Appaloosa Pattern Basics

Part 3 - Base Color Interaction

Part 4 - Appaloosa Dilution

I probably will not get to the (almost finished) fifth part until after the first volume of the Color Book is published. Right now that is tentatively scheduled to coincide with Bring Out Your Chinas Convention in May. So if the blog is quiet in the upcoming months, know that I am just working on that - and the studio backlog.

Once the first book is out, I do plan to split this blog off with a separate one devoted to horse color. I have been told that publishing tends to flush out missing information (that is, you will get a lot of corrections!), which has been part of my motivation in writing. I want to make that easier, so a blog seems logical. I just don't want the subject of horse color, which by its very nature is likely to generate a bit more two-way conversation, to overwhelm the studio chatter here. So watch for that later this year!

In the meantime, I'll still be posting the goings-on here at the studio. I am not sure there will be a lot of new information since I am focusing so much on the books. But little by little I am trying to wrap up stalled projects, and as those are finished I will try to post pictures at the very least.

More snow pictures

2011-01-10T10:17:00.005-05:00

The first time I saw Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig's Vixen, there was something about her expression and posture that reminded me of my own spunky little mare. We were fortunate enough to get snow over Christmas and I was able to take a few shots of Sprinkles playing in it. The above picture reminded me very much of the pose on Vixen. Perhaps Vixen is tossing up her tail after dodging a few snowballs thrown in her direction. That was what Sprinkles was doing with my husband - or at least what she was doing before she decided to steal the snowballs and eat them.

That was a few weeks ago, and today we are snowed in once again. It's a good day to work on reorganizing the studio, since potential power outages make me leery of throwing anything valuable in the kiln. (I always worry about color loss when refiring things.) When vital tools - and their duplicates, purchased during previous periods of hiding - go missing, it's time to impose some kind of order on things.

In the meantime, I hope my fellow southerners are enjoying our unusually snowy winter. It's a good opportunity to spend time in a studio - even if it's only cleaning one.

Season's Greetings!

2010-12-26T16:11:00.002-05:00

I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a joyous New Year!

(The blog will be back to it's semi-regular posting schedule after the holidays.)

Deep thoughts on a Monday morning

2010-12-06T10:38:00.006-05:00

Earlier this year, many of us in the equine collectibles industry pulled together to help a dear friend with her husband's medical bills. The response grew into something way beyond what any of us expected, but while all this love and effort worked to restore our friend's financial security, it could not conquer such a deadly form of cancer.

This left those with outstanding donations in a quandary. This was especially puzzling when it came to what to do with the outstanding pieces of the Terra Cotta Tile Project. Like many, I still had a handful to glaze and even more left to "festoon". What was the right thing to do now that they could no longer serve their original purpose? Equally important, what decision might best preserve the value of the pieces in the project which had been sold as collectibles?

Yesterday those of us involved in the project received word that we were to destroy whatever unfinished, unadorned tiles were left in our possession. By the close of the day, I had done exactly that. I knew it would be hard. Destroying handmade items is not something I find easy, but it was all the harder for me because I knew what went into them. Coming from my faith tradition, these tiles were what we would call "widow's pennies". That is the parable where Jesus instructs his followers that the penny given by the poor widow is worth more then the entire fortune of a wealthy man. What comes from someone's bounty is not worth the same as what comes from someone's poverty. I knew those tiles had been made over long hours by someone who was herself facing horrible financial threats, yet still she was donating her time (and therefor her income) to someone else. It seemed a horrible sin to literally smash all that generosity - all that sacrifice.

But it also made me think about starting over with clean slates. As most of my friends and customers know, I am perpetually overcommitted and almost always falling behind. After losing more time than I expected earlier this year following my surgery, that normal situation has snowballed. This motivated me to set into motion some changes that will allow me a more sane level of responsibilities, but my to-do list is still a discouraging read at the moment. Literally smashing one small commitment was a good reminder for me not to replace the jobs I am finishing with new obligations. I've placed the broken heart from one of the tiles on my whiteboard (the one where I write my daily task list) to remind myself how hard this lesson is for me to learn!

New giftware products

2010-12-03T17:45:00.004-05:00

I have been working on some new giftware items the past few weeks, in between cleaning greenware and detailing some horses. The first is the new pendant, shown here in my favorite purple art glaze wired from the top. The piece is designed so I can drill a hole for hanging at the top or one on each side, depending on how the necklace needs to be strung. This particular one has a twisted antique brass jump ring for the bail, but I've also experimented with wrapped wire bails, too. Those are fun because I can add a bead accent to them, as well as work with less common metal finishes.

My second item is a zipper pull. I've taken the same cabochon that I've used with the bookmarks and trimmed it to fit inside a heavier setting. I thought these would work well as zipper pulls because the bead is almost entirely recessed, which makes it a little more sturdy. I have to admit I have yet to chip one of the unset cabochons, despite intentionally treating them carelessly, but it never hurts to have a little extra protection. This is especially true when you hang around a pony that has an obession with zippers. This particular one has been hanging from my barn jacket for a few weeks now and is none the worse for wear, so I am considering it suitable for the task.

I hope to add both items to the Etsy store in the next week.

[Edited to correct the link to the Etsy store. Sorry about that!]

Fixing the leak (mostly)

2010-12-01T09:17:00.003-05:00

Thanks to the now-working mold straps and some tips from fellow ceramists, my Elsie mold has gone from extremely leaky (bottom) to a more normal amount of flashing (top). I had underestimated just how much I needed to thicken the slip when working with a much larger casting.

I also discovered that I got much better results by pouring successive castings. Because I live in a pretty humid climate, my molds have to sit for considerably longer before I remove a casting. Not wanting to wear my molds out - which getting them too damp too often will do - I had been spacing my castings out over a period of days. My typical routine was to pour one casting and then let the mold sit for one or two days, then casting another. Joan at Pour Horse had suggested doing two castings in a row and then resting the mold. That is working much better.

Now if I could just find enough uninterrupted time to glaze a set. As much as I would like to have a set finished before the end of the year, scheduling tends to conspire against me during the holidays when it comes to things like underglazing. I can do a lot of tasks (like art glaze giftware or clean greenware) in small bits of time with lots of interruptions, but not underglazing. The threat of being interrupted - which seems worse that usual during this time of year - is enough to make me avoid the spray booth. Perhaps I should ask for a day of isolation for Christmas!

Etsy Store is stocked again!

2010-11-26T10:44:00.003-05:00

To help with holiday shopping, I have more bookmarks in the Etsy store.

I have also added a few of the "Inspire" Artist Trading Cards (also known as ACEOs, for "Art Cards, Editions and Originals") in both glazed and bisque versions. My original plan for the trading card tiles was to offer them in bisque so that those interested in learning to glaze might have a sturdy, less-expensive canvas for practicing. I also hoped to use them for their traditional purpose, which is for trading between artists. I love the idea of being able to swap techniques in this way, because I have always found so much value in being able to really look at someone else's work up close.

That hasn't come to pass yet. I fear that I fell behind with all my projects after my surgery earlier this year, and I haven't yet managed to catch back up. Eventually there will be some realistically colored samples, though! In the meantime, pick up some of the bisques if you would like to try some glazing.

And here is a more traditional Trading Card, done on paper with ink, Copic markers and colored pencils. I was experimenting with the card in anticipation of a project for the upcoming Bring Out Your Chinas Convention. I'll post a little more about that soon.

Another sneak peek

2010-11-17T14:45:00.003-05:00

This is the first bisque Elsie with one of the Olivers. I love how these two pieces work as a set.

Sneak Peek

2010-11-12T17:31:00.008-05:00

Since a batch of these guys just went into the kiln with the first Elsie bisque, I thought I would share a sneak peek. Each year I try to make something for Christmas. Usually it is a medallion or an ornament, but this year I wanted to do a pendant. He is really small - just over an inch tall. He is a shrunken and reworked version of the 2008 Christmas ornament. Unlike previous bas relief shrinks, which were done using the shrinkage of the clay, this (and the ornament before it) were done using a material called HydroShrink. I had hoped that it would make shrinking quicker (which it did) and easier (that part is a little questionable). I will try to get some pictures of the process and talk about its pros and cons in a later post.

He is designed so that holes for stringing can be worked in his mane, either one at the top or one to either side.

A not-so-small breakthrough

2010-11-12T09:41:00.005-05:00

One of my mare's barn buddies, Abby, showing the varnish roan coloring associated with the Leopard Complex gene.

The Appaloosa Project, a research group devoted to unlocking the mysteries behind appaloosa patterning in horses, announced today that they had isolated several of changes in the genetic code that correlate with the "leopard complex" gene. Leopard complex is the name given to the gene responsible for the color horseman call varnish roan. It's important because it is thought to be the master switch that sets the stage for the other appaloosa patterns (blankets and leopards). This discovery is important because it means that tests can be offered to determine if a horse has the gene. Since varnish roan is not always visible at birth (especially when none of the patterning genes are present), being able to test for it will be a great boon to breeders of appaloosas.

The article with the information appears in this month's Animal Genetics, in a special issue on horse genomics. An article that explains the leopard complex gene is available in PDF form on my website. (I need to format and upload the other articles from that series!)

This is exciting news for those of us that follow equine coat color research. This is the first step towards a better understanding of the whole picture when it comes to appaloosa patterns. It is likely that research in this area will shed light on how the other complex, multi-gene patterns (like sabino) work. Kudos to the team of scientists at The Appaloosa Project!

Small breakthroughs

2010-11-07T16:06:00.010-05:00

One day when my youngest son was a toddler, he decided he was too old for baths and requested a shower. I set him inside the shower stall in our master bedroom, and went to get extra towels just in case things got especially wet. I was only gone for a minute - just long enough to walk down the hall to the linen closet. When I came back I found him sitting on the floor of the shower, oblivious to the water falling on his head, with all the pieces of the drain scattered around him. In just that brief time he had taken it apart. I didn't even know it came apart.

He is one of those people who are just seem born with an instinctive understanding of how things work. He gets this from his father, because I am most assuredly not one of those people. I often struggle with relatively simple machinery.

Which brings me to the item in the picture. That is the fastener on a mold strap. Mold straps hold the pieces of a mold tight while the slip is poured. I haven't needed mold straps in the past because I have always dealt with molds smaller molds that could be held together with wide rubber bands. This has been a good thing, because I never could figure out how the fasteners worked. What is sad is that I have seen them used at Pour Horse. I'd even unfastened and refastened them, so I know how they are supposed to feel when they lock. I just couldn't seem to make mine work.

I thought I could avoid dealing with them at all by simply using the same kind of large black rubber bands that I had used on the rubber master. They actually came off a set of "moon shoes" that my kids got for Christmas one year. When he first saw them, my friend Joe insisted that the shoes were the best job security he had seen in a while. Joe is a emergency room doctor. Shortly after that the shoes went missing (funny, that!), all except those useful-looking black bands.

I became skeptical though, when I had the completed mold. The rubber master tends to stick together a bit all on its own, so it doesn't need to be cranked closed quite like the plaster one. I wasn't sure the rubber bands were up to holding the large side pieces tightly enough.

As this picture of the first pour shows, they were not. The extra clay around the leg is where the liquid slip leaked between the pieces. (The white areas are from the mold soap that is present on the sides of the mold pieces.) This wouldn't work. Not only does that slight gap distort the casting, but the clay between the pieces effectively glues the whole thing shut. It is almost impossible to remove a horse in this kind of situation without tearing it.

So I had to figure out the mold straps. I felt a little better when even my husband was at a loss. They looked simple enough, and he works in an engineering field. We must not have been the only ones, because in my search for a picture online of how they looked like closed, I found this online tutorial. Suddenly it all made sense, and now I have a tightly strapped mold. I thought it might be worthwhile to share the link, in case others were having similar trouble.

Listing to starboard

2010-10-27T09:28:00.005-04:00

The first casting from a new mold is where you make the big mistakes. I knew that was particularly likely with Oliver because of the placement of his feet. Legs often get shifted during the demolding process. There is also the problem of how drying clay can effect the balance of the horse. Because this is particularly a problem with standing horses, and because Oliver is "tripoded" (that is, he balances on three points), I expected the first casting to be a little off. As the picture above shows, he was more than a little off! He is listing to starboard in a pretty obvious way.

We usually adjust for a weight-bearing leg "pulling up" by shifting it ever so slightly in the opposite direction. The idea is that as it dries, it will pull into the proper place. But to know what constitutes a small shift, I need to have the legs lined up properly.

Since the change is usually too subtle to see even when placing the original next to the casting, I needed another way to check.

Here I've painted the hoof bottoms of the resin Oliver with underglaze. I could have used any paint, but the underglaze was handy and it washes off the resin easily. While the feet were still wet, I set him down on a sheet of white cardstock. Now I have a guide for proper foot placement.

It is not, however, the right size. My final clay shrinkage is around 6%, with most of that happening during the drying process. Usually there is a tiny amount of shrinkage while the horse is still in the mold; that's what enables us to wiggle the casting free of the plaster. That is the point at which I'm usually adjusting the legs. So I needed my placement guide to be just a hair smaller. To do that, I scanned the card stock with the footprints and then printed it out at a 1% reduction. I printed a second page out at a 6% reduction so that I could check it again once the piece was dry. I can't change the legs after that point, but at least it gives me a chance to check that casting isn't hopeless before I invest the time in cleaning the greenware.

So far this has worked and all the subsequent Olivers have stood level. I also have Elsie's pattern ready for when her molds are working, just in case!

You might wonder, looking at the tilting Oliver, why I bothered to clean and fire him. I've found out the hard way that no matter what goes wrong with the first casting early, it is best to keep working because there are sometimes more discoveries. It is better to find them on a casting that is already a loss than to lose one casting for each lesson. In the case of Oliver, I also found that I needed to cast him thicker than usual so I could clean out the clay from the gap between his front legs. Otherwise he ends up with an oddly placed post hole between his front legs. We are used to seeing a belly hole where the horse is posted in the kiln, but a hole in the chest area looked a bit disturbing.

Finishing up the Elsie molds

2010-10-10T11:45:00.006-04:00

In the last post, I had pictures of the first large side of the head mold being made. I thought it might be helpful to show the next few steps, since they might not be obvious.

These pictures might be a little confusing, though, because I normally make two copies of each mold. This one is the second copy of the mold, and the other pictures are of the making of the first copy. As I mentioned before, after I made the first mold of her head I decided to reverse the order that I poured the sides.

Elsie's head mold has three sides: left, right and a gusset. The gusset piece runs from between her ears (like a typical hat piece) down her face and up under her mouth. That piece is designed to break so that the final mold actually has four pieces, but it pours in three. The gusset is the first to pour, and it can be seen in that first picture of the clay barrier. The second piece there is the left side of the face, but for the picture above the second pour was the right side of the face. The left side is the third and last pour.

In this picture above I have already used a planer to clean up the edges so the head can be boxed and the last side poured. Since it is a relatively small mold, I've used Legos. I still had to use clay on the right-hand side of the mold since I am going to be pouring directly into the opening at her neck. Since that cut is not straight (making an uneven cut helps to "key" the pieces back together properly), that side cannot be level and must be shaped with plastelina.

Here is the second mold after it was removed from the Lego box. I haven't yet used the planing tool (left) to level out the other sides of the mold. The top of the mold will still slope along the line of the neck opening, but I will clean up as much of that as possible. It might seem like an unnecessary step, but leveling the sides makes it much easier to stack the molds in the storage cabinet, and it makes it a lot less likely that the corners will get chipped.

Here are all three of Elsie's finished production molds. As you can see, the head mold (top left) is all cleaned and planed. The smaller mold to the right is her tail, and the large mold on the bottom is her body. All totaled, it takes 19 mold pieces to make her. All together, her molds weigh just over 30 lbs. when still damp.

Now all that is left is the waiting. It will take 2-3 weeks, depending on the weather, before the head and body molds are dry enough to use. That's when I will know if this set works.

Learning from mistakes

2010-10-06T13:02:00.011-04:00

I tend to focus a lot on mold-making on the blog, probably because it is the area of my work where I still have so much to learn. Blogging is a lot like talking, and like most extroverts I process my thoughts best outside my own head. It has made for a messy conversation, at least for anyone else wanting to learn mold-making by reading, because it seems many of my posts are about what I should not have done.

I have been blessed throughout my adventures in ceramics with an extremely generous and patient mentor. Joan has always been available to answer any questions I have had, and to offer whatever help she could. But she does live 2,400 miles away. That means she cannot look in horror at something I am about to do, and cry out, "Oh no! Don't do that!"

Which is a big limitation when I assume I understand the next steps. I am usually a pretty decent problem-solver, but sometimes I just miss the obvious.

For some reason, when I made the second version of the Vixen master, I had it my head that I needed to end up with two separate, complete masters for the two different molds. I was used to thinking of master molds as exact - or at least almost exact - copies of the plaster molds they made. I knew the first master, which cast a whole Vixen, would need to hold the different rubber pieces (her head, her one front leg) so that separate molds could be made of those. What I didn't realize is that I didn't have to destroy that original master to do it.

I didn't need perfect masters of the eventual production molds. All I needed to do was temporarily modify the master to make the separate molds. If I could do it once, I could do it again when another production mold was needed. And if it didn't work, I could always modify it a different way the next time. (That is what I cannot do with the current Vixen master mold, now that I am unhappy with the modified design. Darn!)

This is what I should have done. I've boxed up the (unharmed!) Elsie master and just blocked off the area that will make up the separate mold for the head.

The mold sides are rough since I didn't bother to smooth the clay barrier, but a planing tool can fix that easily enough. That way this piece, and the one already poured (visible in the previous picture) and the rubber head can all be boxed and the final piece poured.

I did find that because of the angles of the cut to her neck, it was better to cast the other side of her face second since it gave me more control over the angle the plaster made with the opening of her neck. When this particular mold was finished, the edge was thin enough that I suspected it would crack before too many pieces were cast.

What I didn't remember was that when I poured the plaster for the first piece, I had inserted both the rubber head and the rubber body because there is a small gap where that inner piece meets up with the body. I didn't include the body the second time, so of course some of the plaster poured down the gap and into the body cavity, where it pooled in the tail.

Now I have two Elsie head molds and a white plaster Elsie butt. Next up - the body! I am sure it will be a learning process as well, and I'll share any of the mistakes here.

Etsy Store is open!

2010-09-30T14:04:00.002-04:00

I stocked the Etsy store with several colors of the Arabian Mare bookmark today, and was tickled to find someone had put the slate blue one (to the far left) in a "Treasury" listing. Those are groupings of items users pick out from the site, usually following a theme, to display on the front page of the site. Unfortunately I haven't yet figured out how to link those directly to the blog, but it was neat to see it there.

I'm still in the process of listing some of the pendants and tiles. I thought it would be a good idea to get them up in time for folks that do their holiday shopping early!

I've also in the process of updating the website with pages for the giftware. There has actually been a fair bit of it made here over the years, but a lot of it has never been seen since I tend to make it for my own gift-giving! I've also started formalizing my glaze colors and giving them names. I've had people ask me to glaze something to match an earlier piece and realized that unless I named the color formulas, we'd all have a hard time knowing which blue or which green was wanted. After laughing at the exotic names people sometimes give to product colors, I now have a new appreciation for how difficult it is to come up with a name that gives the buyer a good idea of the tone without sounding too generic and bland or too over-the-top and silly.

Off with her head! (again)

2010-09-28T11:39:00.004-04:00

I never imagined, when I began molding horses here at the pottery, that I'd be decapitating so many of my ponies. I had hopes early on that Elsie would cast bob-tailed but otherwise whole, but there was just too much of a turn so off went the head.

The one I'm holding in the picture isn't the real Elsie master head; since I had a poor casting I had the luxury of making a test cut. I wanted to see how it would set in the rest of the mold and how I would create the two separate molds - one for the head and one for the body - from the pieces. I think this extra needs to go live with my friend Jackie Arns, to keep the infamous Beowulf company. Jackie won't mind that Emma, the ever-shedding studio dog, left a little bit of herself in the rubber.

Bowl o' Beads

2010-09-24T17:29:00.002-04:00

There is a lot of waiting involved with making a rubber master, so I've been testing glazes colors on bookmark beads in between curing times. I thought all the bright colors made them look like candies, so I set them out in my special "mudhen" bowl. The bowl was a gift from fellow potter Karen Gerhardt during her recent stay in England. Later they will go into bookmarks and pendant settings, but for now they are making my table look festive!

Wrapped in plastic!

2010-09-23T19:39:00.005-04:00

Becky Turner commented in the previous post about the foil saving clean-up time. I was so pleased with this side benefit to my clay-saving tactic that I decided to try something similar with the inner pieces. This is a picture of Elsie before I formed the inner pieces with clay. I used plastic wrap to line the inside of her belly and legs, then added the clay on top.

When the piece I poured this morning - the second large side - cures, I will have to remove the clay placeholders. It is best if that can be done without breaking the seal on the two side pieces, but that can be impossible when soft clay is stuck to all the detailed bits under the belly. My hope is that by lining some of that area with the plastic, I can pull it free more easily and leave less of a mess. Tomorrow I'll get to see if it worked.

Miscalculated

2010-09-23T09:20:00.005-04:00

I was so excited that my largest mold boards fit Elsie's length that I completely overlooked the other important factor: depth. Mold boards have to be deep enough to box the mold twice over, because the first side forms the bottom for pouring the second side. As can be seen in the picture above, the first side pretty much fills the depth of my mold boards. Ooops. Not sure how I missed that, but I sure did!

Obviously I am going to need some deeper mold boards after all, but I wasn't willing to wait for them so I had to find a temporary fix. My husband claims that the universal solution is duct tape, but I think in the studio it is Legos. Here I've built a platform around the bottom of the first side to raise the mold boards.

The platform lifted the boards to a more workable height, and proved more solid than I expected. It didn't need to be tremendously stable since I've been doing on my pouring for this one on the floor, but it was sturdy enough to pick up and move without breaking the seals on the clayed-up areas.

So now it's 8 more pounds of rubber (give or take) and I'll be ready to pour the inside pieces!

Getting back to Elsie

2010-09-21T15:29:00.008-04:00

Extra rubber arrived earlier this week, so I was able to top off the first side of Elsie's mold. It took a total of 8 lbs. of rubber to do this one side. I wanted to pour the side pretty deep because I was spanning a fair distance (11" inches across) and I wanted to be sure there wasn't any flex to the mold. In this picture, I've embedded beads to make keys for the plaster support that will reinforce this side.

With the plaster poured and the mold board removed, this is what I have. The bottom is the wooden shelf piece that I used to build up the clay around Elsie. The next layer is the plastalina clay that was used to block off the area. After that is the first rubber side piece, and finally the plaster reinforcement.

You can see to the left what a steep drop her turned head (just barely visible in the left hand corner) creates. That kind of abrupt change will not work for a plaster mold, but the purpose of this mold isn't to make a plaster mold - at least not yet. At this point my goal is simply to get a rubber Elsie.

The top two pieces (rubber and plaster) make one major side of the mold. My next task will be to block off the inner pieces with clay and pour the second side piece.

In this photo I have peeled off the wooden base that was used to build up the clay. Because I was concerned about weight, I used tin foil to fill the inner area and then added the clay. Even so, I ended up using almost 5 lbs. of plastalina. (The entire assembly in the first picture weighed close to 24 lbs.)

I should add that I have set the mold piece down on a towel because the plaster support is still quite damp. Until it truly dries, a good blow on a hard surface can fracture it. The towel is a softer surface, but mostly it serves to remind me to set the mold down carefully!

One of the side benefits of using the foil was that the original was much cleaner than usual, since very little clay was actually touching the resin surface.

In fact, it peeled off in one long piece, leaving behind a fairly clean original.

There is a little bit of clean-up to get her ready for the shaping of the inner pieces, but using the foil was a great time-saver in addition to minimizing the weight.

Some useful tools

2010-09-15T10:26:00.006-04:00

I was grateful for the tip about the grids on Lynn Fraley's blog. In the previous post, you can probably see the bubble wrap lining the smaller damp box. That had been my own solution for keeping the greenware elevated from the damp plaster, but I can see her tool will work so much better. It also reminded me that I've meant to share some of the tools I've come to depend on for some odd jobs around the studio. Since I've been absorbed in mold-making these last few weeks most of these are tools used either for that or for prepping the resin masters.

1) Sponge-backed sanding pads
Although they are here with mold-making tools, I really use these for everything from cleaning masters, to polishing plaster to cleaning greenware. They often aren't sold by standard grit numbers, so I like to buy them in person by feel, and I use all kinds. Often I cut them into small strips and round the edges (a big help when they are used on soft greenware, since the corners can gouge), then strip off most of the padding from the back. I find for some tasks I need them a little more flexible than the thick layer of foam allows.

2) Miskit Liquid Latex
This is another all-purpose tool in the studio. It's primary purpose is to mask off bisques during underglazing, but I also use it when I want to clay up a resin original. The blocking clay I use, Plastalina, is really soft and sticky, so I find that masking areas with deep grooves (like the mane or the eyes) before I place that side down in the clay makes the later clean-up much easier. Just be careful to keep it well away from the mold lines, since the seal against the master needs to be tight there.

The exposed face of the resin master tends to get clay residue as well, especially near the mold lines. To clean those places without disturbing the clay, you can paint the latex over the area (including the plastalina itself) and allow it to dry. When it is peeled off, it takes the residue with it. The small square under the Miskit bottle is a rubber cement eraser, which is useful for removing dry latex. It is quite rigid, so it can be cut into shapes to reach tight areas.

3) Clay Shaper

These tools are really popular with sculptors and can be purchased with different tips and with varying firmness. I use the smallest firm (black) wedges to apply the liquid latex. The have just enough give and dried latex peels right off of them.

4) Fingertip Swivel Knife

I found this tool, made by Fiskars, at a scrapbooking store and immediately fell in love with it. (That hobby has more cool tools!) The tiny blade is just the right size for cleaning seams, and the loop that fits around your finger braces the knife in a much more controlled fashion than an ordinary Xacto handle. Even better, the blade can be positioned at any angle to the handle, so it is perfect for getting into tight spots. It was made for cleaning out the "keyholes" in manes and tails - and Oliver's crossed legs!

5) Schwan All-Stabilo Pencil

We used these water-soluble pencils at my family's sign shop to mark cut lines. They were great because they gave a very visible blue line that didn't brush off easily, but could be removed completely with water. I use them to help mark out mold lines on resin masters. I can see the lines more clearly than with a regular pencil, but I can still remove the marks (or change them) when I am done.

6) Embossing Stylus

This is another cool tool from the scrapbooking store, also made by Fiskars. One of the most time-consuming - and truly boring - tasks in making molds is sealing the mold boards. The clay needs to be sealed against the edges, as do the corners of the box. It has to be done reaching inside the box, and without bothering the soft clay around the horse. It is messy work, and it always left a messy edge around the rubber master. Now I just run the larger end of the embossing stylus along the seam, and it makes a clean seal in minutes.

Here is the stylus sealing the edge of the mold in yesterday's picture. I love this tool!

7) Swizzle Stick Sanders

I found these at a hobby store that catered to military miniatures, and they are particularly handy for sanding hard to reach areas of hard surfaces like resin. They are more rigid than the sanding pads, and can be bend at angles when needed. They come in four different grits, with the finest pretty comparable to 600 grit sandpaper.

Most of these tools are pretty inexpensive, but it is really the time saved (and frustration avoided) that makes such a difference. Hopefully some of them will prove useful to others.

Supersize me!

2010-09-14T15:03:00.006-04:00

When I first converted my studio for full-time work in ceramics, I imagined that like my previous efforts with resin-cast figures, most of my work would be in the smaller "mini" scale. (For readers that are not involved in equine collectibles, that makes an adult horse just a little under 3" tall.) Most ceramic horses were either minis (often called "thumb" scale by ceramics collectors) or the slightly larger "curio" scale, with few horses going more than "classic" scale (the standard dollhouse scale). So I got a Skutt 614, which is a hexagonal kiln that measures around 12" across the diagonal. That seemed a safe bet for almost anything I wanted to fire.

Later I added the smaller AIM 88-D, which is a square 8". It's the workhorse in the studio that does most of the bisque firing. It is rare that I have anything that won't fit in the AIM, nevermind that larger Skutt. But I knew that with ceramic horses getting bigger, the time would come when I would need to replace the Skutt with something a little bigger. Since that will also mean rewiring the studio, I have been putting it off until I had a horse that no longer fit. Although it was a squeeze, so far even Stormwatch fit. But while he is a larger horse than Elsie, she takes up a lot of horizontal space so I wondered if she might be the one. I was relieved when she fit.

But what I didn't realize back when she first arrived was just how many other items would be too small. As can be seen from the first picture, my largest mold boards proved just barely long enough to hold her master mold. I've included the master for Imp, a mini-scale foal, and my foot for scale. I tried to hold my hand up for scale first, but I didn't have enough arm length to get back enough to get the whole mold in the frame. (I guess by now my liking for flowers painted on my toes is obvious.) The Imp mold is 3" across its length, whereas Elsie is 12".

The mold boards did fit, but I realized as I assembled my supplies that I didn't have a container large enough for mixing that much rubber. I usually use small throw-away rubbermaid containers, but the largest ones only hold a gallon. I thought I would need around 5 lbs of rubber. I ended up purchasing a few plastic dishwashing bins that could hold 3 gallons. I got them home and realized that they were too large to sit on my scale. So I constructed a platform that would hold the bin (and still let me read the weight).

That is when I was reminded of my inability to estimate volume. I'd already done that with the Plastalina, which is the brown clay used to block out the areas that don't yet get rubber. Not once, but twice, I had to run out to get still more of it. I probably should have known better with the rubber, but it spoils quickly and is quite expensive. I order it as it is needed for each step. So now I have an Elsie that is covered in rubber, but not really deeply enough to be stable. Luckily, additional rubber can be added after the first pour cures, so it's just a matter of waiting for the next delivery.

I almost forgot the "damp box". When horses are cast in separate pieces, those pieces stay in a damp box while they are cleaned and assembled. That's my mini-scale damp box on top: a tupperware sandwich container with a thin layer of plaster on the bottom. Not even Elsie's tail will fit in there, so I had to find a container that would work. It was surprisingly difficult to find a box deep enough for her (with the attached tail) that wasn't also really large, but this 12 quart tote looks like it will work out well. I liked that it had flip-down handles, rather than a pull-off lid, since it will keep jostling to a minimum when I have to open the container.

I can see that going larger is going to take some adjustment when it comes to tools and materials!

Buckskin Silver

2010-09-12T19:28:00.006-04:00

One of the best places to find horses with unusual coloring are trail rides. In many breeds, traditional colors dominate the show ring, but among the horses used for pleasure riding there is often a lot more variation. That is what I was hoping to find at the recent Latta Plantation Poker Run. I got there a little too early to see many horses, but I did get these pictures of "Peaches", a Rocky Mountain Horse.

I wanted to share her because she is a really good example of what happens to silver dilutes with age. Peaches is a buckskin silver, and according to her owner she is seventeen. I apologize for the extreme in perspective (my camera has been out-of-whack in that regard for a while), but I wanted to show just how dark her tail was. Pale manes and tails tend to darken with age, and silvers are no exception. It is not unusual to find an aged silver with a tail almost indistinguishable from a non-diluted horse of the same color. The manes usually keep their lighter ends, but it might be a stretch to call them flaxen. It could also be easily mistaken for sun-fading.

Peaches also had a really cool trait that seems to be more common in horses carrying two separate dilution genes (silver and cream in this case), but it can be found in horses without any dilution at all. That is a hazel eye.

Peaches was great for holding still while I got a number of close-ups, although I did have to keep brushing her long forelock out of the way. (Click on the picture to see a larger version.) I am going to have to try to work this trait into a ceramic horse at some point, because it sure is striking.

Appaloosas

2010-09-10T10:09:00.008-04:00

Appaloosa patterns have been on my mind lately. Some of that comes from watching the changes in my own mare's pattern. After years of without much change, she has begun to roan more visibly.

She still has her rib stripes, though the background color is far closer to gray than chocolate these days. It never ceases to amaze me how very vertical the lines are. They do not follow the contour of the body (like the stripes on a zebra) or the direction of hair growth. Instead they look like someone drew them with a ruler.

I have been pondering the lines because I considered placing Sprinkle's pattern on an Oliver, but I need to do a little research on how the stripes appear in foals (if in fact they do at all). That's one of the pitfalls with appaloosa patterns; they are progressive so age matters.

Sprinkles did get more white hairs each year, but the process was so slow I thought she'd be quite old before she looked really different. Then last fall I noticed she was getting a few white dots on the back of her ears. I have tried a few times to photograph them, but getting her head to point away from me when I am holding something as interesting as a camera is hard to do!

This summer she started getting the same white dots on her legs. They are more numerous on her hind legs than her front, and far more to the inside than the outside. At the same time she is getting darker dots there, too, though they are much harder to catch since they are only visible in the right light. (The faded parts of her coat are somewhat iridescent.) The spots are quite muted and soft in outline, much like the Tetrarch spots some grey horses get.

You can also see that she has a completely shell hoof on that leg. Appaloosas have stripes on their hooves when they have solid legs, but when there are white markings they have shell hooves just like any other horse. That is, unless they are homozygous for the "master switch" for the appaloosa patterns. Those horses have shell hooves (or nearly so) no matter what color the leg is.

Which is why I find one of Sprinkle's buddies so interesting. I have shared pictures of Jag before. He is a black blanket appaloosa with the splash gene. He is certainly not homozygous because his blanket is spotted; homozygous blanket appaloosas end up as snowcaps.

These are the two sides of his blanket pattern. He certainly has spots. He also has the neatest white patches that run all along his spine up to his withers. One of these days I'll remember to get a shot of that, too.

So he is heterozygous and black. Yet his hooves are almost shell colored, they are so minimally striped.

I only got a shot of his two hind feet, but the front look much the same. They are faintly striped, and that one hind has a dark patch, but they are predominantly shell. Sprinkles, and most of the other genetically black appaloosas I have encountered, have had predominantly dark hooves on their solid legs. (I should mention that Jag has no white on his feet at all.)

I have wondered if this is just a normal variation of expression, or if it is related to his carrying the splash gene, or some other combination of factors. That is what makes appaloosas (and sabinos, for that matter) so very interesting to me. The appearance of the pattern depends on the interaction of many different genes rather than a single one, so it is a puzzle to determine which traits can occur in conjunction and which ones cannot.

Like I said, part of my interest comes from being around Sprinkles. But I am also looking forward to glazing, which I will begin again in earnest as soon as Elsie's molds are drying. Almost all the horses that come up next in line are appaloosas, or appaloosas in combination with some other pattern. I want to get all these little things right when the time comes, so I've been asking myself these kinds of questions.

Oh, and one last photo. This one is for my friend Sarah. Jag is the only pony at my barn that is plumper than my own, so when he turned to scratch his leg I just had to catch all those wrinkles for her!

Patience is overrated

2010-09-09T20:43:00.004-04:00

That's because the first Oliver casting came easily out of the mold. Sorry for the grainy picture, but it is dark outside so the studio has very little natural light at the moment - but I had to share!

A potter of little patience

2010-09-09T14:22:00.003-04:00

This is my last look at this Oliver mold while it is still clean. They don't stay like this, of course. Once the slip gets poured, they get stained. Eventually a corner chips. And of course, I learn what parts don't work as well as I imagined, and what I should have done differently. But at this stage, when they are still pearly white, I can still believe they will turn out rows and rows of pain-free greenware.

I told myself that I'd leave the two Oliver molds until after the molds for his mother, Elsie, were done and drying. Although I do have her tail molds drying, the rest of her is no where close yet.

Here she is almost ready for the first rubber piece to be poured. This is actually an intermediate mold that will be used to get a rubber original, which will then be cut apart so that a separate master can be made for her head and neck. Needless to say, there are a lot more steps before I should be pouring an Oliver.

If I had been virtuous, I would have finished cleaning the studio. In my defense, I can say that half of it is very, very tidy. But then I got to the area where the Oliver molds were sitting in the sun, quite obviously dry. I couldn't resist. Surely it would be okay to test one, just to see?

I don't know yet how well it worked, since it won't be ready to demold for a while still. (More unbearable waiting!) I used to think that molds worked better when they had been "broken in" for a while, but I suspect the real issue is that the newness has to wear off enough that I am reasonably patient.

Evolution of molds

2010-09-01T14:09:00.007-04:00

Or, "Why There are Fewer Custom Glazes Out There Now"

When I was first learning to glaze, my good friend and mentor Joan Berkwitz generously offered to send me a handful of old Pour Horse production molds. These allowed me to experiment with underglazing without fear of ruining an expensive bisque, which was a godsend. They also allowed me to learn to pour slip and clean greenware with what were some very forgiving molds.

But their true value came when I began to make my own molds. Nothing teaches how molds work like getting castings out - or not getting them out, as the case sometimes was! They also allowed me to see how Joanie solved mold-making problems. Although I rarely make castings from them anymore (some are truly worn out by now), I still use them in this way.

I had a bunch of them out the other day, weighing potential solutions to some of the challenges presented by Elsie, and it struck me that it might be fun to share a visual of just how far mold-making has come in the last decade. I took exploded views of three different mini-scale molds. All three were designed by Joanie, though the production copies of the middle one (Finn) were made here at Blackberry Lane.

This is "Limerick", which I believe was the second Pour Horse "thumb scale" release following the Shetland mare, "Bressay". Her mold is only three pieces: right side, left side and the ear hat. (Not only did I learn to pour slip with this mold, but I also learned that you don't clean a messy mold with a wet sponge. That's why the one side is discolored!)

The early minis like Limerick were designed with production in mind, so the sculpture was simplified. The hindquarters, for instance, were "diapered". That is, the whole area between the two legs and under the tail was filled in. Once ceramic producers started getting working with sculptures designed for resin casting - with their detailed fannies, chests and "boy parts" - molds had to have gusset pieces. Turned heads also added mold parts. This is "Finn" with eight pieces: right side, left side, ear hat, head/neck piece, two front gussets and two back gussets.

This is now pretty much the standard mold design for what I think of as an easy piece.

That's because we now make things like this. This is the three mold set for "Taboo" with a total of thirteen pieces. His three separate molds cast (top to bottom in the picture) his 1) head and tail, 2) one front and one back leg and 3) the rest of his body and legs. There are also numerous small pieces for the undercuts in this mane and tail, all handmade with each new mold. His various pieces are cast and then he is assembled while the greenware is still damp.

Needless to say, there are a lot fewer Taboos (and Vixen, who casts from a similarly complex set of molds) than Limericks out in the world! But each mold is pushing the envelope for what we once thought was possible in earthenware.

Which brings me to Elsie and Oliver. Those are two almost-dry Oliver molds off to the right. He is, by present-day standards, a relatively easy mold. I have high hopes that will allow me to get more Olivers out in the world.

The two molds to the left are copies of Elsie's tail mold. It takes six pieces to make her tail alone - twice as many as it takes to make a whole Limerick. I'm still designing the mold or molds for the rest of her, so I don't know what the final piece count will be for her. In many ways her size alone makes her easier to do than the minis, though, so hopefully there won't be a host of motherless Olivers.

Unusual shapes

2010-08-26T14:28:00.003-04:00

There was no question that I would need to cast Elsie's tail separately. What I hoped was that once I cut it free from the sculpture, I could find some kind of angle that would simplify the shape for mold-making. As it turns out, there wasn't a magic angle. It was a shape that didn't work well from any angle, and I was stumped about where to draw the mold lines.

I finally decided that I'd clay up one side, pour the first side piece and figure out what to do from there. I had high hopes that the planes would suddenly make sense once one was covered, but I also knew that I had rapidly degenerating rubber components. Polyurethane prepolymer (rubber Part A) degrades after it has been exposed to air, so I needed to use what I had left quickly. Experimenting seemed like a good idea.

The process did work, though there really wasn't a simple answer. The strands of the tail move in too many directions for anything but a fairly complex mold. Right now I think it will be a five piece mold, though the area that fits inside the bend may work better broken from the rest of that piece. That's five, possibly six, pieces and we haven't made it to the body yet!

Meanwhile Oliver's two production molds are about half-dry. I am dying to test them.

Wooosh!

2010-08-22T15:29:00.004-04:00

All the Flying Hearts tiles sold from the Auction Barn in a flash, so many folks didn't get to see them. If you'd like to see all the finished ones to date, I set up a page on the website.

Those are all gone, but I will be doing a few more in the future. They were a fun break from playing in the plaster, and all the money went to help Melissa and Herman. Good all around!

Ponies that wear hats and ponies that don't

2010-08-19T16:47:00.005-04:00

Around here, most ponies wear hats. That's because ears create an undercut; the area between them is hidden. So unless the mane is thick enough to cover the space between, there is a mold piece that goes there.

When horses have turned heads, there is sometimes a second piece that fits over the head or the head and neck. Both Finn and Vixen have these. I had assumed that Elsie would need a hat and most likely a second piece since her head and neck turn quite a bit. But after looking at her a bit, I'm rethinking that part.

One of the first things I did, back when I first started learning to make molds, was draw hypothetical mold lines on many of the Hagen-Renaker minis. I figured they were good examples since they were made with the same process (earthenware slip from plaster molds) and they were mass produced and sold relatively inexpensively. If anyone knew how to make workable molds, it would have to be them!

What I noticed was that many of the horses had heads that turned just right. That is, the turn shifted the ears and even the nostrils to one side of the mold. The rough outline of their mule above shows how this works. See how both the ears are visible? Nothing is hidden, so the mold can pull freely without the 'hat'.

What I've found intriguing about Elsie is that her ears are the same way. I'm not sure I can design the mold to eliminate the hat altogether, but I have been surprised by just how much of her face is on the same plane.

But before I can think much about her face, I have her tail to worry about. As the picture shows, I was was able to cut it free with a jeweler's saw. I am finding its abstract shape an absolute bear to mark for mold lines. Unlike a four-legged animal it isn't an obviously two-sided object. I've decided to have a go at claying it up with only one set of lines drawn (the one side I can see clearly), and then seeing where I am.

Tiles are coming!

2010-08-18T11:06:00.002-04:00

I'm in the process of getting pictures of all the finished tiles, and should have them up on the website in the next day. Watch on the "New!" page for teasers, but they will eventually have their own page there. There are enough of them (almost 20) that it will be easier to show them there than here on the blog.

And this is my elaborate system for taking pictures of relief work: a piece of cardstock set on the back porch. It works surprisingly well!

Festooning!

2010-08-17T14:50:00.003-04:00

While I wait for Oliver mold pieces to dry, I've been decorating the tiles I glazed for the Flying Hearts Fundraiser. I like Sarah's term for this better, though. Festoonery. I have been festooning my tiles, which has been great fun. I promised myself that I had enough beads, baubles, ribbons and wire to festoon all three hundred tiles, nevermind my twenty, and that I wouldn't go out and get more. (I did, but only a few...)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, terra cotta clay has intimidated me for some time now. When I began testing my own tiles in preparation for the project, it didn't look like I was going to have any better luck this time. By the time the box from Sarah arrived, I had decided that I would just throw caution to the wind. Carefully selecting my glazes and applying them just-so was obviously not working. I decided instead to just grab whatever glaze was handy and see what happened. (It seemed a fitting tribute to the sculpting artist, at least!)

Oddly enough, that did work a lot better. It was also fascinating, because the terra cotta altered the glazes in unexpected ways. My favorite was this one.

The tile to the left is Lynn Fraley's "In The Ribbons". It was cast in white earthenware and glazed with my favorite sea-green glaze. The Flying Heart tile to the right has the exact same glaze. The only difference is that it was cast in terra cotta. The oxide in the clay turned the colors to blues and purples.

What isn't visible in that photo - indeed I haven't been able to capture it in any photo - is that the high areas where the terra cotta coloring shows through don't actually look red-brown. They look like copper, including a slight glittery effect. I found that some of my translucent glazes sometimes gave an even more pronounced metal-flake glitter look. Others had pigment that clustered most densely in small dots. What's more, if I fired the tiles a second time the colors changed again.

It was a lot of fun, but it certainly gave me a new appreciation for just how reliable the underglaze colors really are.

Moving on to Elsie

2010-08-10T15:38:00.004-04:00

The master mold for Oliver is done. The rubber original had not yet been poured when this picture was taken, but it is now curing in the mold. It will take a day before I know if the casting is good, but since he is at a stopping point I decided it was time to tackle his mother.

The first step for Elsie was going to be removing her tail. I am still on the fence about whether or not I'll need to lop off her head (more on that in a future post), but there is no way that tail can stay where it is. If an undercut is an area on the original that overhangs and obscures another area, then her tail is the mother of all undercuts! As can be seen in the picture above, the entire tail loops back around and sits in front of the rest of the tail.

And to make her even more interesting, there is another undercut area behind the fringed edge near the dock on this side. She has lovely tailbone detailing under there, so it needs to be preserved. The logical thing to do is cut the tail off where it meets the body. I have already drawn the cut line in the top picture.

I hate cutting, and hate cutting resin most of all. It's really hard to get a clean cut, even with a jeweler's saw (which will be necessary to avoid cutting the other part of her tail along with the rest). In this case, however, cutting the resin is the lesser of two evils because cutting the rubber master would mean I'd have to find a way to get the tail to fill properly with rubber. If there is something I dislike more than sawing on resin, it's fiddling around with complicated rubber pours!

So tonight I'll do a little tail docking. Once that's done, I have to start making some decisions about how I think the rest of her will work.

A small bit of flooding

2010-08-09T18:43:00.004-04:00

No, not the weather kind - though Charlotte has had a bit of that recently. Flooding is the process of filling undercuts on an original so a simpler mold can be made. I mentioned flooding in my previous post about preparing the Meows and Minis cat medallion. It has been on my mind as I've worked with Oliver and Elsie.

The biggest lesson I learned from molding Vixen was that I needed to reevaluate my use of flooding. I had fallen into the trap of thinking that flooding was an "easy out" not well suited for highly detailed sculptures. It seemed like a cheat. I also hated the idea of altering an artist's vision for their piece. Flooded areas have to recreated in each casting, so that leaves the door open for mistakes.

What I found with Vixen was that flooding sometimes ensures that the finished casting is actually closer to the original. That's because it's easier to take flashing off from a piece of greenware than it is to build back an area that has been scraped away. On pieces that have minor undercuts, intentionally adding flashing so the mold pulls freely is sometimes the smartest answer. Otherwise the mold will skim off the undercut (if you are lucky), or the entire casting will tear apart. It only took reconstructing a dozen or so Vixen withers to bring that lesson home for me!

Most of the flooding I did on Oliver involved minor flashing on the mane and ears. The one area with a more drastic treatment was his tail. The overall tail shape was pretty simple to mold, but the individual strands formed long "fingers" that lined up one behind the other. By filling them I could ensure that the mold pulled freely without breaking the tail. This would also protect the "points" of his tail while I cleaned the rest of the casting. (The flooding in between the strands will be removed last.)

I used the hardest type of green Chavant clay for my flooding because I wanted something sturdy enough that I could leave it on the original as a reference. The picture here was taken after the original was removed from the completed master mold, so obviously the filled areas are pretty bombproof. Although it isn't visible in the picture, I also added a distinctive texture to the flooded spots to give me a visual cue about what needed to be removed. My hope is that this will result in a less "fiddly" mold - and ultimately more shiny Olivers!

Oliver underway!

2010-08-03T11:36:00.007-04:00

I still have photos and a BreyerFest report to make, but I thought I'd pass along this picture showing the start of the Oliver master mold. Oliver and his mother Elsie, both sculpted by Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig, are new releases for 2010. Oliver's master mold is part of the reason I am behind on my posting. Work on it was interrupted for back-to-back trips, first to Kentucky and then to Alabama, so I've been eager to finish the project before I hit the road to Ohio in a few weeks.

In this picture he's being prepared for the pouring of the first large side. The claying up isn't completely finished; the edge along his topline has to be brought up tight to the original. This is important since it determines how tightly the mold will fit, and therefor how much (or how little) flashing will be present on the castings. Extra time spent getting this part right means less time spent later. The rest of the mold keys (the indentions around the outside) have yet to be cut and the outer edges still need to be made square and true. Unless there is trouble getting a rubber casting, this is usually the most time-consuming step.

Fortunately this is a very straight-forward mold to make, so I don't anticipate any trouble. I was pleased to see that he even fits within my favorite set of mold boards, which are smaller and easier to handle. Elsie is a tight fit even for my largest set, so I suspect I'm going to need to get my husband to make a bigger set before I start working on her mold. I should probably break down and have him make them from plexiglass like this set Joan has, because being able to see through the sides is really useful, and the clamps don't gouge them.

If only everything could be molded with Legos! They don't have the strength for larger molds, but for smaller projects they are faster. That was how I could make ten new molds for the cabochons used in the previous few posts. With just one functioning mold and really humid weather, I could only cast two beads in a day. That wasn't going to work, since they are the sort of thing that only makes sense in large batches. I made the new molds just before I left for Kentucky, so they are now dry and ready to use.

My plan is to experiment with glazes on the cabochons and the Flying Hearts Fundraiser tiles during the rubber cure times. I swear the hardest part of moldmaking for me is leaving the rubber long enough for it to properly cure. I'm always dying to see if it really worked! So a distraction is a good thing. If it all works out, I'll have Oliver and Elsie plaster molds drying and a fully stocked Etsy store by fall.

More bookmarks and pendant settings

2010-07-19T16:35:00.006-04:00

I received more cabachon settings, including some in silver, so I thought I would share them. This silver filligree one was among my favorites. I made a handful of them, thinking that I would link them together (see the corner connectors) to make a Victorian styled cuff bracelet. Unfortunately I didn't have any beads in colors to match the glaze that I used. (I wasn't able to get the color in the photo right, either. It's actually a lot more lavender than rose in tone.)

The order also contained more bookmark blanks, including silver. I suspect another color of glaze would compliment the silver better, but I had done a large batch of this shade of green so it was what I had. (It's my favorite for testing things because it is a very predictable glaze, which is a rarity in the colored glazes.)

Here are two more of the pendant setting styles in antique brass. There are other styles, and most came in silver, too. I ran out of beads before I ran out of settings. They are also different glazes, though I suppose dark and light turquoise aren't that far from green. I need to pull out some of the red and blue glazes when I get back from Kentucky.

Speaking of which, while I won't be selling at the Artisan's Gallery this year, I will bring samples of these and some of the other jewelry components for anyone who would like to see them in person. I find art glazed pieces harder to accurately photograph, especially at this level of magnification. (The filligree piece, which is the largest of them, is only 1.25" across.)

Breakables Challenge Awards

2010-07-17T12:40:00.005-04:00

I leave in just a few days for the North American Nationals and BreyerFest. I haven't attended the event in the last few years, so I am really looking forward to seeing old friends. I also plan to take lots of pictures so I can share them here. For those readers that aren't involved in the equine collectibles community (as I've recently learned many here are not), BreyerFest is an annual event sponsored by Reeves International for collectors of their Breyer model horses. Almost as soon as it began, it became the defacto national gathering place for those interested in three-dimensional equine collectibles of all kinds.

The North American Nationals (usually just called "NAN") is the national competition for the model horse industry. NAN rotates coasts every other year, so that on even-numbered years it is held in conjunction with BreyerFest. BreyerFest draws a large number of people from all over the world to Lexington each year, and for those years that it is paired with the Nationals it is larger still.

This year the event has another draw for those of us involved in the ceramic end of the industy. Maggie Barkovitz has brought back the all-ceramic show "Breakables".

I am bringing along some green art glazed "Inspire" tiles for the winners of the Breakables Blackberry Lane Challenge class. I'm hoping to include some matching bookmarks, too, if my order for the brass blanks gets here in time.

Handling backgrounds

2010-07-17T10:14:00.003-04:00

These two Inspire tiles show the two different approaches to handling backgrounds: painting the horse first, and painting the background first.

The first approach is perhaps the easiest, since it involves finishing the horse in exactly the same way ceramic horses are done. The tile in the picture just has the base coloring applied. He'll eventually be a darkly dappled buckskin, so the tile will go through several more layers (and firings) before the clear glaze is applied. With each step, the background will be masked during spraying and then removed for firing. After all the detailing is done, clear glaze will be applied to the horse and fired. At that point there is a completely finished, glossy horse on a bare bisque background.

At that point, the art glaze can be applied to the background using an ordinary paint brush. Since the horse has a hard gloss finish, it is easy to clean any excess art glaze from the horse. That's really the only trick to this approach. The art glaze must not overlap the clear glaze or it will bleed onto the horse during firing. It's also a good idea not to apply it too thick close up against the edge of the horse.

The second approach is to paint the background first in Concepts. Because this type of underglaze is hard and semi-glossy after bisque firing, it can be masked over. Ordinary underglazes are so fragile, even after they are fired, that removing latex from them causes scuffing and chipping. They are also porous, so the latex bonds strongly and is often very difficult to remove. Concepts and the other brands do vary, but every one that I have used does hold up well enough to masking. Some colors fire glossy enough that it's even possible to remove overspray without masking, because it wipes off with a damp sponge.

With background-first tiles, the clear glaze is not added until the entire tile is done. When it is applied, it is added to the entire tile. The areas covered by Concepts don't usually require a lot of glaze, but they do need some to be truly sealed.

It is also possible to combine all three approaches. The Celtic Pony in the blog header was done this way. His bridle was done with airbrushed Concepts, which were then bisque fired. After that, he was painting just as any other realistically colored horse. Because the Concepts used were quite glossy, and because they were very dark (light colors sink below darker ones in underglaze), I didn't bother to mask it. I just airbrushed the colors of the face and then wiped away anything on the bridle. After that was bisque fired, I added clear glaze to the entire pony and ran it through a glaze firing. Then the green art glaze was added to the background and the medallion was sent through its second and final glaze firing.

Both systems seem to work equally well, though each does have a drawback. Art glazes are really unpredictable, so it's possible to get a background too dark or too light or just plain unattractive with the color of the horse. Concepts, on the other hand, give a lot more control over the final look, but the finish is extremely fragile until it is fired so handling it without scuffing some off the edges is a pain. For the most part, it really depends on which look you prefer.

Removing underglaze

2010-07-12T12:19:00.007-04:00

One thing I worry about when blogging is that after three years, I often forget whether or not I have already posted about something. For every post I make, I usually have two or three that I meant to post, so it's hard to keep track of which ones were written and which ones I only thought about writing! Maybe there is a reason I am so fond of this "flair" from Facebook: maybe I am closer to making those "new friends" than I think!

So with apologies in case I have previously passed this tip along, I wanted to include it before I got back to using Concepts and art glazes. It's a pretty important detail, so it really deserves its own post anyway.

The post from a few days ago showed how Concepts interact with latex masking. It's an important thing because almost all underglazes are airbrushed. It's almost impossible to create an even tone with them any other way because they streak. Raw (that is, unfired) underglaze also looks opaque long before it really is, so the streaking isn't visible until after the piece has gone through it's final gloss fire. At that point, everything is permanent.

Masking is used to protect those areas that need to stay white. Because earthenware bisque is porous, it is almost impossible to completely remove color after it has been applied to the surface. The only drawback is that none of the most common forms of masking - liquid latex, wax, tape and foil - give a very precise line. They are not suited to fine detail. For that reason, the final edges are usually etched with a blade or other sharp tool.

With some underglaze colors, this works really well. Others are more resistant, or leave a more pronounced stain. For that reason, it's often a good idea to apply a barrier between the underglaze and the bisque.

I have found the best choice for this is the Duncan Cover Coat "Arctic White" (CC 101). It fires to about the same color as white earthenware, so it doesn't really effect the final color. It does etch off really easily, though.

There is more information about why lighter colors do not change darker colors in this older post.)

That's why it makes a useful mask for the last few millimeters of a pattern. The larger areas of the pattern (or in the case of my current tiles, the background) are masked with liquid latex, but the area closest to the final border is thin layer of Arctic White. Unlike the rest of the underglaze, I apply it with a small brush. It's also a little more flexible than the latex because I can decide to leave an area (ie., not etch it off) and it will fire normally. Were it latex, traditional underglaze would flake off.

A similar approach is taken with patterns that have a lot of body roaning. For situations like that, the Arctic White is airbrushed in a light coat before the other colors are added. Doing this makes the body color more fragile and prone to scuffing, but with roaned horses that is usually pretty easy to correct or at least camouflage.

Here is the Inspire tile from the previous post (the one with the bright green background). I painted the inside edge of the horse with Arctic White, then applied the liquid latex. The second tile, which isn't pictured yet, will have the horse painted first so the outside edge was painted white and the mask was applied to the background.

I'll explain the two different approaches ("background first" and "horse first") in the next post.

This is just too cool

2010-07-10T16:58:00.003-04:00

I will post again about underglazes and art glazes, but I just had to share this. I thought it was neat that there were pendant settings for the smallest of my beads, but finding out they fit these antique brass bookmarks was just too cool!

Underglazing with Concepts

2010-07-09T08:06:00.008-04:00

As I mentioned in the previous post, the newer types of underglazes (Concepts, Stroke & Coats, SuperStrokes) are often problematic for painting realistic horses. They are popular at what are known in the ceramic trade as "Contemporary Pottery Studios" (also sometimes called Ceramic Cafes) where people can come and paint bisqueware. That's because they are designed to have the clear glaze applied while still raw, so that the piece is completed in one glaze firing. Traditional underglazes are bisque fired first, and then covered with clear glaze and fired again.

For the sake of simplicity, I'll use the brand name Concepts in this post to refer generally to this type of glaze.

Concepts can be bisque fired like normal underglazes, but they have some properties that make working with them a little different. The most important of these is how they interact with liquid latex. Latex masking fluid is commonly used on ceramic horses to mask off white markings and patterns. I've painted on the bisque tile above in a giant "N" for the world "no" because latex and these kinds of underglaze do not mix.

These two tests have been sprayed with a mixture of Concepts colors. With the "Inspire" tile, I've added directional shading in (traditional) transparent underglaze colors and then completely cleaned the latex from the edges. On the "N" tile, I only sprayed the Concept mixture. Afterwards, I pulled most of the latex off from the letter, but left it on the border. I'll fire them both at Cone 04.

(I should mention that traditional underglaze and Concepts can be intermixed just fine, but the resulting underglaze almost always behaves like a Concept underglaze.)

Here is what happens after the tile is fired. With ordinary underglazes, latex usually burns away or at most leaves flakes of color that can be brushed off easily. With Concepts, the latex melds with the underglaze to form heavy, raised edges of dense color. These will not come off. The only way to remove them is to break away the underlying bisque.

Although it is hard to see in these photos, the rest of the surface is semi-glossy. That makes it hard to add details with transparent underglaze because it will bead along the surface. It also has a slightly pebbled texture that, while it usually fires away once the true glaze is added and fired, makes added detail even more difficult.

That pebbled texture is the other reason that Concepts aren't well suited to body color on horses. The texture goes away with firing, but in many cases it has enough dimension when raw to catch the directional spray. This close-up of the green background on the "Inspire" tile shows this really well. As the darker green was sprayed to catch the edges of the text and border, it also caught the undersides of the "pebbles".

Most of the time these do even out during the final glaze firing. All underglazes tend to diffuse and blend a bit during firing, so the speckled effect usually disappears or is at least toned down. It doesn't always, though. That's not a big deal with a background, where it can look like an artsy treatment, but it can ruin an otherwise nicely-done horse.

The other aspect of the Concepts is that after bisque firing, the finish is as hard as nails. That is a problem if more etching or erasing is needed. But it's the one trait that makes them really useful for medallions. In the next few posts I'll show in more detail the two different approaches to coloring backgrounds.

Mixing underglazes and art glazes

2010-07-08T08:14:00.011-04:00

A question from another ceramic artist had me thinking about the different kinds of glazes used in making decorative pieces like medallions, pendants and beads.

For realistic colored horses, the process used here at the studio is pretty straightforward. The horses are airbrushed with a combination of both opaque and transparent underglazes. Details are added using a combination of erasing, etching and handpainting with transparent underglazes. Afterwards the horse is fired with a clear (usually gloss) glaze.

Giftware that isn't realistically colored, like the medallions that are often used for awards at shows catering to ceramic horses, are done in what are known as "art glazes". Art glazes are designed to "break" over the high spots of a design, so the color is paler there, and then pool in the recesses.

This Christmas ornament I did for my (non-horsey) family and friends a few years ago shows the "breaking and pooling" effect really well. The tiny pendants from the previous post were also done with art glazes. (The one that was done in green and blues used a blue glaze which was wiped off the high spots and then painted over with a pale green glaze so that the high spots would be green instead of pale blue.)

There is also a third kind of colorant that falls somewhere between a true underglaze and an art glaze. It gives a flat, opaque color like an underglaze, but unlike traditional underglazes it bisque fires with a hard, often semi-glossy finish. True underglazes are extremely matte, almost chalky, after firing. Often these kinds of underglaze - which are marketed under the names Stroke & Coat (Mayco) and Concepts (Duncan) - are easier to find than traditional underglazes, which is unfortunate for anyone wanting to do the kind of underglazing used for ceramic horses because they don't behave quite the same way.

They are, however, extremely useful in combination with traditional underglazes when backgrounds are involved. The dapple grey Arabian pendant above (the original 1.5" version of the piece that was shrunk in the previous post) had a background done with Concepts.

The tiny bit of blue background under the horse's jaw on this medallion was also done with Concepts.

The bay Celtic Pony at the beginning of this post, and the pinto one that decorates the blog header, were done with traditional underglaze (the ponies), art glazes (on the backgrounds) and Concepts (the bridles).

Over the next few days I will to explain when and why I use art glazes and Concept-type underglazes, and why something other than traditional underglaze is needed for this kind of project. I will also show how I get underglazed finishes to "play nice" with art glazes - or at least how I tilt the odds in my favor that they will play nice!

Ceramic beads and base metals

2010-07-05T09:37:00.008-04:00

This July marks my third year of blogging from the studio. I used the above image in the first post I made. I suppose it's appropriate, then, to return to the design now.

My original intention, when I sculpted the pendant, was to have a three-dimensional "test tile" for underglazing techniques. Because airbrushing underglazes involves a lot of directional shading, having something horse-shaped really is important when you are first learning. (That was actually the purpose behind the "Inspire" tiles, but more on that in a future post.)

The little pendant got some use for testing underglazes, but I quickly got brave enough that most of the testing went on to full-bodied models. It did prove really valuable for testing art glazes, though. Low-fire art glazes like the ones commonly used for award medallions are designed so that darker pigment pools in the recesses. This is great for textured surfaces, and is one reason why a lot of the backgrounds on my medallions have stamped patterns. The glaze works really well with those kinds of treatments.

What many glazes do not do well are larger, smoother surfaces. Some of them puddle oddly on them, while others just do not show enough contrast. Horses, with their big muscle masses, have a lot of flatter surfaces, so glaze that can look great in another application might not always flatter them.

So the pendant mold became my favorite way to see how a given glaze formula might work with a horse shape. The ones in the above picture are my glaze chips. They have a bail at the top like a pendant, but in this case that is so I can hang them as a group on a cord on the wall of the studio. The glaze formula is written on the back of the pendant, so I can pull whichever I need and recreate the color.

Back when I was shrinking the Celtic Pony medallion, I also shrank the pendant. The pendant was already small - only 1.5" in diameter - so mostly I was just trying to see how small I could go before the detail was lost. I ended up with an image around 18mm in diameter.

At the time I thought the size might work well for a bead, but the design was too thin to run a stringing hole. The other option was to punch holes in the sides of the design so that links could be fashioned, but the only open areas (behind the neck, under the chin and below the forelock) would tilt the head at an rather strange angle. That's when I decided to weld two mini-pendants together back to back. That's how the bead above is made. The stringing hole runs down the center between the two sides. It worked, but it was far too time-intensive to make, and far too easy to squash the design while trying to manipulate the two sides together.

That was the point at which I set the project aside, thinking that it was educational to shrink something so small, but that nothing practical was going to come from it.

That was until I ran across some base metal bezel settings. I love the recent jewelry trend for using antique copper and natural brass, so I often check out the new offerings. When I saw the copper bezel setting (second from the right), it struck me that it was probably the same size as my tiny pendant. When I brought it home, I could see that it was just a millimeter off (17mm). I was able to trim the pendant in the greenware stage, but I did wonder if there were other setting sizes available online (17mm seemed like a "off" size to pick). Sure enough, there were a variety of settings with 18mm being more typical. The first and third pendant in the picture are 18mm antique brass and copper respectively. The last pendant is one of the 1.5" originals (taken from my glaze chip cord).

Here is a close-up of the copper version. There is another setting style, but I found that it was just a fraction too small so the pendants would need a slight trim to fit.

I am looking forward to making some jewelry with the pendants. I love the look of the pottery with base metals and silk cording. For those that haven't seen this type of jewelry before, I'd highly recommend the Vintaj website. It is full of wonderful products and ideas, as is their blog.

Summer time!

2010-07-04T06:56:00.004-04:00

All the kids have been away at camp these last few weeks, including my pony, Sprinkles. The barn where I board her hosts a summer camp, and we thought it would be a good experience for her. She is a favorite among the campers, and certainly loves all the attention. In the picture above, she's been "decorated" with Carolina blue handprints for the show the kids put on for the last day of camp.

Of course she also needed lots of blue ribbons to complete the picture!

She is also - finally - roaning out. Sprinkles is a suppressed leopard, which means that over time her forehand will roan out to reveal more spotting until she more closely resembles a true leopard. In the right light, the spotting on her face is now visible but I decided to wait until she wasn't done up in blue paint to try to get those pictures.

Everyone being occupied with camp meant that the house has been really quiet, so I took advantage and logged some long hours in the studio. Unfortunately for the purposes of the blog, much of that time was spent cleaning the mounds of greenware that had accumulated. Just as I occasionally find the clutter in the studio is more than I can tolerate, I reach my limit with the castings. It isn't very interesting for the purposes of blogging, but clearing the greenware shelves is great for a sense of accomplishment. (This was a good way to combat the frustration I have felt about not being able to finish the books in time for this year's BreyerFest.)

In addition to clearing the shelves, I also made a fun discovery about a small project I had abandoned sometime last year. It had not worked as I envisioned it, so I set it aside. It turns out to be perfect for another application. Once the final results are out of the kiln (with luck, that will be tomorrow) I will post it.

Preparing the original

2010-06-21T16:53:00.007-04:00

I've had a couple of questions lately about what kinds of originals I use when making molds. I thought this project for Meows and Minis would be good for illustrating how resin originals are used in making ceramic molds. The original was sculpted by Becky Turner in clay and then cast in white resin. One of those copies was then sent to me to make the ceramic molds.

I can make molds from clay originals, and have done that with my own pieces before. "Inspire" was done that way last winter. When working with simple medallions or tiles with a two-piece mold (a face and a "lid"), there isn't really a need to make a hard original. That changes, however, when someone needs to mail the original to me. Resin copies are a lot easier to ship.

The only downside is that some things that work in resin don't really work with plaster and clay. That's because resin is typically poured into a flexible rubber mold. I make a rubber master mold, but that's for making the plaster molds. The actual castings come out of those, and they obviously don't bend. Medallions are even more tricky because they don't have any hand-holds. The piece has to pop out clean from a rigid block. That usually requires a bit of "editing" when a medallion wasn't originally designed for ceramic production.

The biggest concern with most medallions are the outside edges. For the piece to come out easily, they need to be bevelled. I learned this the hard way with my first medallion, the Celtic Pony. In the linked post, you can see the first version which has perfectly straight sides. After fussing forever with getting them out of the mold in one piece, I finally redesigned it so the sides (and the inside border) sloped ever so slightly. Life was instantly easier!

In the picture above, the resin copy has been glued to a glazed tile. Where the resin meets the tile, you can see the shadow cast along the bottom edge of the design. It actually slopes slightly inward, which will pin the castings inside the mold. You can see where I've started to add the bevel on the left-hand side. I don't want to add much, because I don't want to change the feel of Becky's design, and I need to be careful to perserve the organic quality of her edges. The trick is to add just enough to make it work.

These are my have-to-have tools for this kind of work. I do all my claying up, including the more elaborate full-body horse molds, with this kind of soft, inexpensive Plastalina clay. I like the brown for when I work with white resin because I can see it. I use a bright robin's egg blue when I work with clay originals, again so I can see it against the original. I use the Goo Gone as a solvent to smooth the Plastalina, though I sometimes use vegetable oil instead. Both seem to work pretty well. The tool in front is my favorite for getting a steady bevel.

This is a close-up of the same tool. One side of the tool is slightly domed (facing the camera) and the other is flat. It's just about the right depth to catch the edge of the medallion. By holding it at a steady angle against that edge, I can get a consistent bevel.

I use these shaped Q-tips soaked in Goo Gone to clean the excess clay from the resin. Here the top and left side have been cleaned of excess clay but the bottom has not.

In this picture bevels have been added to all four sides. I've also taken care of some of the undercuts created by the fur and by the edge of the topmost ear. Undercuts are areas that are hidden behind a part of the design when viewed from the direction that the mold piece pulls. In ceramic molds, undercut areas will either bind the casting into the mold, or tear the casting as it is removed. Slight undercuts like the ones in his fur are sometimes workable in a multi-piece mold because you can jiggle the casting free. In a one-piece mold like a medallion, even a small undercut can make it difficult to free the casting.

To prevent that, I have "flooded" the undercuts, which is just filling them flush with clay. You can see I've done that with two sections of fur, one on each side of the face, and along the edge of the ear. If the undercut is important to the design, I can take the excess back out again when I clean the castings. I will probably so with the ear on this particular design. It actually takes less time to resculpt that area on each casting than to repair (or repour) the damaged castings when they stick. This is a trade-off that happens with full-bodied horses, too. Sometimes it is less work to add details like hoof bottoms to each casting that to work with the undercut.

Finally the last step is adding the keys. Those are the half-circles at the corners of the tile. I need keys so that the second piece of the mold, the lid, will stay in place without shifting. It is much cleaner to sculpt keys in clay than to cut them later into the rubber.

Now the original is all ready to be boxed up so the rubber master mold can be poured. With luck I will have plaster production molds from this drying by the weekend.

Contamination

2010-06-21T07:47:00.005-04:00

Working in pottery (especially doing so without any formal training) has often made me wish that I had a better background in chemistry. But even more so, it has made me glad that I don't suffer from an obsessive compulsive disorder. Ceramics involves enough issues surrounding contamination!

I mentioned in the earlier post that I don't often work with terra cotta slip because it can contaminate other materials. It also leaves stains. I thought a picture of a new plaster mold with its first pour with the slip might be a good illustration. Needless to say, this is a dedicated terra cotta mold. It cannot be used for the ordinary white earthenware slip I usually use, because the residue would stain it. I also have separate mixers, pitchers and tools for working with red clay.

Since my work area is relatively small, I tend to shut down the casting and glazing end of things whenever I work with red (or other colored) clays. I did this over the weekend so I could cast a few more test tiles. I am also using the down time to work on a handful of small jobs that don't involve regular greenware or underglaze. One of those is a mold of a medallion for Meows and Minis, a show hosted by Chris Wallbruch that benefits Cat Guardians. The medallion was sculpted by Becky Turner of Soltice Art Studio. I've long admired Becky's medallions, so I am looking forward to translating them into clay. I also though it might be helpful to show how a medallion is prepped for moldmaking, so I'll be doing that in the next day or so.

Terra cotta trepidations

2010-06-14T11:30:00.006-04:00

When Sarah announced the Terra Cotta Tile project as part of the Flying Hearts Fundraiser, I was eager to participate. I am a huge fan of tiles as it is, and the chance to play with one of her stylized horse designs was too tempting.

I have to admit, however, to being intimidated by terra cotta. It's not that I haven't tried it. I was so taken with some of Lynn Fraley's samples during Mayhem a few years ago that I had some terra cotta slip shipped back to Charlotte. I even cast a number of medallions with it, though until yesterday that was as far as I got.

That's because Lynn was also generous enough to send us back with some of her Laf'n Bear test tiles in terra cotta to use for glaze testing.

I am sorry to say that these two guys were among the less ugly things I managed to do to her tiles. I seemed to have a knack for turning terra cotta into a shiny brown blob, no matter what glaze combination I tried.

Terra cotta clay creates red dust which contaminates everything around it, so I put the slip away and told myself I would try again another day. Since Sarah has already started pressing tiles - and since they are all made from terra cotta clay - I realize that the time to face my terra cotta terror is now. Fortunately, I did pour a number of test medallions with the slip before I threw in the towel, so I won't be forced to experiment on the "good" tiles when they arrive!

The sad part is that I have always loved the look of darker clay on tiles. The tile above, made by my friend Melanie Brooks at Earthenwood Studio, is still one of my favorites. It is not terra cotta, but she did the same kind of glaze on a terra cotta colored tile of a wolf that I gave my sister-in-law a few years ago and I've always loved the look. Melanie works in stoneware, though, and I'm trying to find a way to get a similar look without leaving the earthenware clay bare.

Hopefully I won't run out of test pieces before I find something that works!

Flying Hearts Fundraiser

2010-06-13T16:04:00.004-04:00

The effort to help Melissa just grew and grew. My friend Sarah said it best in recent post to her blog.

"So what began as Heather Malone-Bogle's plaintive question of what could be done for them has now bloomed into a joyous, enthusiastic snowball of generosity from every corner of the industry. It's times like this that remind us what's important and what unites us, and so this effort has been a true celebration not only of Melly and Herman, but of what it means to be fortunate enough to have them as friends."

And snowball it has! A website with the donations is being managed by Heather Malone-Bogle. You can see the various donations, or just find out how you can help, here:

Flying Hearts Fundraiser

I have already placed the Imp up on the AuctionBarn. His auction will end Tuesday night at 8pm EST. At least, I hope that's how the time I entered translates. I've gotten that part wrong before!

What I haven't yet done is update the website or get Adrenaline photographed. (The only file I could find for him was the one face shot.) I hope to have that done by tomorrow.

Things are moving quickly

2010-06-12T12:24:00.007-04:00

Since my post yesterday, things have been moving quite quickly on helping Melissa Gaulding. Apparently I was not alone in thinking about selling a horse or two on her behalf!

Many others had the same idea, and others have offered help with managing the effort. Brian and Shallon over at the AuctionBarn have offered to host the auctions free of charge. Heather Malone-Bogle is in the process of setting up a webpage, and there are a number of other plans in the works. It really is heartening to see so many people come together to help a member of our community.

For my part, I have decided that the first horse will be my Imp, "Butterbean" (pictured above). I haven't offered any publicly yet - mostly because they are a real bear to paint! I also plan to offer a few other horses for direct purchase. One of those will be my Okie, "Adrenaline". He was actually the kiln-mate to Mel's much-loved Okie, "Asheville", so it seems appropriate that he help the cause, too.

The poor guy looks downright alarmed
about being sold off, doesn't he?

Right now I am leaning towards holding "Elvis" until Breakables. I have heard from Maggie that she's planning to include a few lots to benefit the effort at the auction there. I thought it might be a good idea to space out the pieces being offered.

When I have more information, I'll share it here.

Elvis has left the building

2010-06-11T12:06:00.002-04:00

Well, he will be leaving it.

Many of you have probably heard by now about the horrible situation with fellow collector Melissa Gaulding and her husband Herman's battle with cancer. Mel recently announced that she was going to have to liquidate her collection in order to pay medical expenses.

As I looked through my collection of bisques today, trying to decide what I could donate for the cause, I realized that I had finished pieces that could be sold now. Some are prototypes, while others have been kept because they were a particularly good example of some technique or another. Others, like Elvis Impersonator (above), are just horses where I just got too attached to part with them.

I know that there aren't enough horses here to keep Mel from having to sell some of her collection, but with luck maybe by selling some of them, I can allow her to keep a few favorites. If there is one thing I know, more horses will come out of the kiln and take the place of the ones that leave!

So I am sorting through what is here and how best to offer them to buyers. When I know which ones and how they will be sold, I'll post it to the mailing list and most likely have a full listing with pictures on the website. In the meantime, I would encourage folks to keep Melissa and Herman in their thoughts and prayers. All financial hardship aside, they have a long road ahead of them and can use whatever support the collectibles community can give.

Unexpected things

2010-06-04T09:33:00.013-04:00

You will never guess what I am!

I started getting requests to write a book on horse color shortly after I started writing articles on the subject, but I didn't take the idea really seriously until after I began doing seminars at BreyerFest in 2001. My husband co-authored a physics textbook a few years later, and I began teasing him that surely my obscure interest (horse color) was more marketable than his (optical physics). I am still not sure about that, but his publishing experience did convince me that I was too used to controlling my images and text to work with a publishing company. The growth in self-publishing options, particularly print-on-demand, and the belief that I probably knew the market for this kind of book better than most publishers, decided it for me.

The book I truly wanted to write didn't seem feasible at this point. I needed high-quality color printing, and while the prices have come down a great deal in recent years, they aren't yet down low enough. I thought that producing an in-depth book on color identification at a reasonable price was still a few years off, so I thought perhaps a smaller scale project might be a good way to "learn the ropes" of self-publishing. What I had in mind was a book that expanded on the information provided in my breed color charts. Those charts have always been abbreviated, both in the scope of the breeds and the colors themselves (new colors have not be added over time). They also don't give any background or clarification on the information. That information has always been in my notes - in my rather infamous "color notebooks".

These are just a few of the sheets from a few of the notebooks. After almost twenty years, there are thousands of pages - and still they represent only a fraction of the accumulated information.

I thought I could produce a book with a brief outline of the colors and patterns currently known, and then present each breed with a narrative of what colors were present in the gene pool. I envisioned a handy reference book that could fill in what the charts did not tell. Since it was not designed to explain horse color, but merely to tell the story of horse color in the different breeds, it could be printed in black and white.

So that was the plan - a handy reference book that could be written in time for a June deadline (making the first copies available at BreyerFest 2010). Along the way, a lot of unexpected things came up.

The horses' stories got longer. I'm sure my friends would point out that this is common with the stories I tell! But I am laying some of the blame with technology.

I'm a better-known individual than my pony friend up there, but you might not know what I am either!

When I started work on the book, it was important to me that it be as grounded in fact as possible. I knew that many breed 'purists' weren't going to like some of the information I had, so I wanted to be on solid ground with what I wrote. But more importantly I didn't want to simply repeat what previous volumes said about a given breed. Having read countless horse books, it is rather striking how most simply reword what some other author said on the topic - and sometimes even the rewording is pretty minimal! I thought the least I could do was confirm information with first sources.

This probably wouldn't have changed the scope of the book, except that technology meant that I had access to a lot more information. I already have an impressive amount of information right here in my own library, but in the last few years many registries have gone online with their databases. Most of the American and British databases are restricted to members of the various breed societies, or are only available on a subscription basis. Smaller countries, however, have proven to be a lot more open. This, paired with Google Translate, has allowed me to tell the stories of many obscure breeds more fully.

The other important bit of technology were sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive. Projects like these are scanning older texts and offering them as PDF files for downloading. In the case of Google Books, there is a powerful search engine that sifts through not only titles, but the text of books and periodicals. Fortunately for me, the formative years of selective breeding in horses is the time leading up and the time just following the turn of the last century. It coincides almost perfectly with the books aging out of their copyright protections. Having access to so many contemporary texts from that time (and being able to quickly search them for specific subjects) has allowed me to better understand the earliest times for many of these breeds.

The downside has been that the book has become unexpectedly large, and is taking an unexpectedly long time (not to mention eating up an enormous amount of my attention). This stopped being a "quick reference" long ago, but I am even more enthusiastic about telling the tale. I think that here, nearly a century in to selective breeding of animals, is a good time to record these stories and give some idea of the sweep of history involved. It is my hope that by showing how things really were, perhaps those of us who love horses can see more clearly how to proceed in the future. It just won't be done in time for this year's BreyerFest.

Oh, and the two horses pictured are some of the unexpected things I have discovered while writing. The black pony is - believe it or not - a Haflinger. He wasn't just any Haflinger, either. He belonged to the Emperor of Austria, and was pictured as a "typical example" in a nineteenth century treatise on horse breeds. The grey horse is a Hackney. While I knew the color had once been present in Hackneys, I wasn't aware there were breeders focusing on the color so late into the twentieth century. (It is, as best I can tell, truly lost now.)

Musings on art and artists

2010-05-23T05:53:00.006-04:00

Water Lilies, by Bessie Potter Vonnoh, c. 1913

There has been a very interesting discussion on the member forum for the Realistic Equine Sculpture Society about how the equine collectibles community and the artist who work in it are perceived by equine artists working in the fine art world. Some of the comments reminded me of something I saw during my last visit to Brookgreen.

One of the galleries there had an exhibit entitled "Fifteen Women: One Hundred Years of Sculpture". One of the things that has always struck me about Brookgreen is just how many pieces in their collection were sculpted by women. It was also clear that many of the pieces were designed not for galleries, but for gardens. I have often wondered if the work these women did, often portraying children and animals, got the same kind of scorn from the "proper" art world. That proper art world was already turning away from realistic work; indeed, Brookgreen was established in part in reaction to that. Did the marginalized realistic sculptors of that era in turn marginalize these women for making expensive "lawn ornaments" just as some look upon artists in my field as making "toy horses"?

The museum card next to the sculpture pictured above had an intriguing comment:

"At a time when most sculptors produced monuments, Bessie Potter Vonnoh made significant contributions to small bronze sculpture and garden statuary designed for the embellishment of the home. ... Concentrating on sculpture for domestic settings that combined naturalism and elegance, Vonnoh entered a male dominated field creating a pathway to professional success and making high-quality sculpture accessible to a wider audience."

I have never had a lot of concern about whether what I did was considered "art" or "Art" - or even craft. Having been raised by a commercial artist, I was indoctrinated in only one important distinction among artists: starving or not-starving. The idea of a viable market was always front and center among my considerations. But I think the quote above talks about what has kept me involved in collectibles. For any number of reasons, the average person finds Art intimidating and incredibly distant from their day-to-day life. I like the idea that we are making "high-quality sculpture accessible to a wider audience".

Aging gracefully (mostly)

2010-05-21T17:07:00.004-04:00

This is the girl that claimed aging would not matter to her. Easy for her! (The picture was taken by a friend twenty years ago because my "new boyfriend" Alan asked for a picture and I didn't have any. The lipstick was a rarity then; it simply doesn't happen now!)

I was encouraged by my friend Joan’s post about aging a few days ago. It is always comforting to know that you aren’t alone.

I always told myself I would accept aging gracefully. This seemed like an easy enough claim to make, since I’ve never cared much about looks. My approach to personal appearance would be more accurately described as “try remember there is a line between being low maintenance and being a slob.” Like my friend Sarah, paint- and mud-covered studio clothes and flip flops are my normal attire.

Obviously this meant that when I started graying, I would simply be gray. Of course it helped that my image of “gray” was formed by the way my mother’s lovely true-black hair turned a cold-toned salt-and-pepper. What I didn’t bargain for was a white streak appearing right at the natural part in my hair. Despite the young people in my life insisting that this was trendy and cool, all my mental images of dark hair with a white stripe are distinctly negative. I would have been okay looking older… looking old even. But I wasn’t cool with looking like I should be kidnapping some nice young couple’s Dalmation puppies. So like Joan, I found a talented colorist.

That may have been a blow to theory about aging, but the really difficult part has been accepting the increasing loss of my sight. I have always been near-sighted, of course. It was pretty moderate when I was younger, so I only occasionally wore glasses. As my husband used to say, we wore glasses when we really needed to see, and didn’t when we need to be seen. (I should note that he does have some personal vanity.) Over time that changed to “not seeing much without them” and then to “needs glasses not to trip over things”. Still, through it all my near vision was fine, which was for me all that really mattered.

In recent years, the near vision has started to go, too. When this changed Joan’s ability to work on small-scale horses a few years back, my husband (an optical physicist) helpfully explained why it was inevitable. I chose to disbelieve him.

But working on Vixen and especially Imp, I know my days doing really small horses are numbered. Ott lights and lenses for close-up work are working for now, but I know that consistently working small is probably not in my future. Even now I can only work on them for a while before my eyes simply stop focusing that close. I don’t plan to stop releasing mini-scale pieces. (I’m still dying to produce Sarah’s upcoming stock horse stallion!) It is still my favorite scale, and I will keep working on small horses for as long as I can. But it is likely that the upcoming Elsie and Oliver will mark a turning point at the studio, with a greater number of larger-scale pieces being released.

If only reversing aging eyes was as easy as changing hair color!

The mud

2010-05-20T06:13:00.005-04:00

After the post earlier this week about plaster, I received an email asking what type of clay I used. The question came at a good time, since I was in the process of mixing a new bucket. Since most of the things I make are tiny, a two-gallon bucket of slip like the one in the picture above usually lasts me about a year.

Like most American ceramists making horse figurines, I cast my pieces in earthenware. British pottery companies like Animal Artistry usually work in bone china. I sometimes glaze bone chinas, particularly those produced by Animal Artistry or Marcherware, but anything cast here at Blackberry Lane is done in earthenware. There are things about glazing bone china that are easier, but bone china production is extremely difficult. Earthenware is much more forgiving. (I also like that the fired clay is a warmer-toned white than the bone china. Since white areas of the horse are usually bare clay, and the underglazes are themselves somewhat transluscent, the color of the clay changes the look of the finished piece.)

White earthenware slip is widely available in the United States, and it comes in seemingly infinite varieties. I use a type based on the old Hagen-Renaker recipe. Hagen-Renaker was a pioneer in the production of high-quality, highly detailed ceramic animals. It was later used at Pour Horse, which is how I first learned about it. Having used other commercially available slip, I can't imagine using anything else. The formula has an unusually high talc content, which I'm told is why it fires extremely white and retains an amazing amount of detail. Certainly if I cast something in "regular" slip and "good" slip, I can tell by the touch which castings are which.

I should mention that the supplies in the picture aren't for making the slip from raw ingredients. Since I don't have the space for the kind of equipment that takes, I purchase it from another potter ready-made. It comes in two-gallon buckets which I use to store it. When I am casting, I keep a working quantity in the pitcher. There is a strainer over the top of the pitcher so I can pour the slip from the bucket to the pitcher without getting any dried bits from the rim.

I also had someone write to me about how hard it was to mix the slip by hand. The slip is suprisingly heavy, and it sometimes thickens after it sits, so mixing with a hand tool would be a fair bit of work. I use a cement mixing attachment that fits into my husband's cordless drill. (This is why he can never, ever find this particular tool - it's usually in my studio.) It isn't in the picture, but I also use a small handheld mixer for whenever I need to remix the slip in the pitcher.

The date on the bucket indicates when the slip was made. In this case, it is five year-old slip. Slip works best when it has aged. Since I fear losing my supplier and having to make my own, I tend to hoard it. I use it so slowly, aging has never been a problem here! That might change, however, when I add the larger pieces to the production line later this year.

As a side note, a friend pointed out that I could set comments on moderation, which would allow me to screen for spam. I am going to do that later today, since I really do prefer to keep them turned on. I am a firm believer that conversations among people often lead to new information, and that doesn't work as well when the conversation is one-sided. I love talking to folks who read the blog, but I like it even better when readers can also hear one another.

Plastered

2010-05-17T10:05:00.005-04:00

One of the drawbacks with long-distance learning is that it's really easy to overlook the obvious. For those of us who work in slipcast ceramics, there are a number of things we just take for granted because we deal with them on a constant basis. An email message from someone struggling with mold-making reminded me of this.

Probably the most common problem I've seen among people attempting to make their first molds is something as simple as using the wrong plaster. I know in this blog I use the generic term plaster, as do most ceramists when they are talking about making molds. The problem is that we aren't actually using generic plaster. Ceramic molds - at least the kind used for detailed eathernware castings - are made from a special kind of plaster called "Pottery Plaster No.1". Using the ordinary plaster available at the local building supply store leads to a lot of frustration. I've learned that when someone calls me to say they are having trouble, I need to ask what kind of plaster was purchased.

Pottery Plaster No. 1 is made for this kind of work, but it's also really finicky. If it gets damp it tends to clump, which ruins it. Molds made with clumpy plaster rarely turn out well. Living in the southeast, I end up losing a lot of plaster to humidity.

I try to minimize this by dividing the plaster into smaller portions which are kept in plastic bags that are then stored in a sealed plastic container. I've found that one 50 lb. bag of plaster fits pretty comfortably in two document-holder plastic containers. This way I can pull out just enough plaster for a job, without exposing the rest to the air.

As you can see, I have this set up on a paved driveway. It is important not to let the plaster dust contaminate the clay, and this kind of work is pretty dusty. I like to keep it as far from the studio as possible. I've often wondered what my neighbors think as I make up dozens of bags of white powder, but so far none have asked!

Pretending to be a graphic artist again

2010-05-13T16:32:00.003-04:00

This past week I had to temporarily trade in my clay for the graphics tablet, dust off my rusty rendering skills and catch up on some promised drawings. This little trotting guy is supposed to get transferred to some tiles for my friend Addi Velasquez and her all-china show "Mud Day". I've never used the transfer technique before, so I'm curious to see how they come out.

In the meantime, my youngest son asked if I would print him out so he could color him. I guess he does look a bit like a page from a coloring book. I recently took a class on coloring prayer mandalas, and had a great time coloring intricate horse patterns on one of those Celtic horse circles. Maybe I should print two copies out and color with him!

I also had to design the t-shirts for the Science Olympiad team I help coach. We agreed that we would just use some simple text since time (and money) were short. But the school's mascot, a cartoon Viking, was just too tempting. He needed to become a mad scientist! Don't all fur vests come with pocket protectors and pens these days?

It has been a fun change of pace, and just what I needed to break my obsession with the horse color book. I have never been a great multi-tasker, so it is easy for something to take over my time to the exclusion of all else. These projects had immovable deadlines, so I had to set the manuscript down. Now I am all charged to get back in the studio and work in the mud!

Atalaya

2010-05-11T14:15:00.020-04:00

"Now I have five monkeys chattering in the studio, the peafowl screaming in the yard and the bears crawling on the other side. As a sculptor I call it an embarrassment of riches but others might not think so... " - Anna Hyatt Huntington

Since I had mentioned the Huntington dogs in the last post, this seemed like a good time to finally post a tour of Anna Hyatt Huntington's home, Atalaya. The name comes from the Spanish word for "watchtower", and the building in the first photo was inspired by a lookout tower in Morocco. The original one was used for spotting Barbary pirates, but this one was a water tower for the estate. It also was designed to attract bats to help control mosquitos.

Anna and her husband Archer had built Atalaya when Anna - who had tuberculosis - was told that she needed a quieter, warmer location. Atalaya was modeled after the Moorish fortresses Archer recalled seeing on the coast of Spain, and it does look a lot more like a military site than someone's home. But it was truly their home and its rooms have always made me think of what my own friends and colleagues might build, were money no object. With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to give a virtual tour.

Atalaya sits directly across from the entrance to the Huntington's sculpture garden, Brookgreen. In fact, the drive runs straight to this arched brick entry way. At the end of these arches is the front door to the main house. If you turned around and had really good eyesight, at the other end is this sculpture.

Those are the big fighting stallions that sit at the front gate to Brookgreen Gardens. Anna sculpted these, and they are cast in aluminum, which is why they are such a pale silver color. A road now runs between the two properties (Atalaya and Brookgreen) and separates them.

As much as I would love the idea of having Brookgreen sitting directly outside my front door, it's what was behind the house that had a lot of appeal to the rest of the members of my family. They are standing just a dozen or so yards down the path from the back door. (I believe I took this photo at high tide.)

Sadly, while the house was named a National Historic Landmark in 1992, it hasn't been especially well-maintained. The interior floors are brick, and the walls were whitewashed brick. The whitewash is peeling and discolored, and many of the shutters are missing.

The ornate ironwork on the exterior of the windows is still there, though much of the facade is covered with ivy.

I suspect the ivy was allowed to grow up the walls of the inner courtyard even when the house was occupied, but now it covers much of the building.

With all the exposed brick and little ornamentation, it has always been hard for me to imagine this was the Huntingtons' personal retreat - a place they went to for comfort and renewal. I think I would need something that held heat a little better, even in the relatively warm climate of South Carolina.

But while I wouldn't have carpets, I would have a place to keep my bears!

These are the bear pens. Anna used the cages to keep live specimens for whichever project she was working on at the time. I am fond of pointing out to Alan that taking over part of his garage for my spray booth is nothing. I haven't asked him to build any wild animal enclosures on the back of the house yet.

And the cages were attached to the house. What's even more surprising to me is that directly facing the yard in front of those cages is the back wall of the stables. Mr. Huntington was an indulgent spouse, tolerating Anna's bears so close to his home. But her horses must have been saints!

The grassy area behind this fence, which sits on the other side of the bear pens, used to hold the kennels. Like the bears and the horses, the kennels were also inside the main walls.

Just beyond the stables is Anna's outdoor studio, which is where she preferred to sculpt. I had the guys stand inside to give a sense of size, because the place was too large to photograph whole. The doorway Matthew (in the red shirt) is standing in front of is the entrance to Anna's indoor studio. I noticed that it was more than large enough to get a horse inside.

It was also large enough to hold one - or several! I had an even harder time photographing the room to show its size. The ceiling actually rises at an angle towards those windows on the left. The whole wall on that side was lined with windows.

The ceiling also had these windows to allow in yet more light. The door to the left in the previous photo goes up stairs to the rest of the house. I was amused to see that while it had a large library room, there weren't any formal rooms that one might expect from people of the Huntington's social stature - no ballrooms or parlors or dining rooms. None of my sculpting friends have a place to keep bears, but I know that trading formal rooms for studios is a place where we can all relate!

Changes in the comments

2010-05-10T06:30:00.002-04:00

I hated to remove the comment feature, because I like hearing from readers. Unfortunately the level of spamming on Blogger sites has gone up pretty dramatically in the last few months, and I'd hate for someone to click on one of their links thinking it was a legitimate comment. So I've turned off comments for the time being.

You can always send comments to my email, which is available on the studio website and on my Blogger profile page. Most of you send comments this way anyway, so I suspect it's a change that most people won't notice.

Long-delayed correction

2010-05-09T20:00:00.006-04:00

Wolfhound, by Zenos Frudakis

Last fall, when Addi Velasquez and Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig toured Brookgreen Gardens, I mentioned in passing that Anna Hyatt Huntington, the founder of the Gardens, had been the first breeder of Scottish Deerhounds in America. The post, which contained pictures of Anna's sculpture "Deerhounds Playing", had been linked on an online Deerhound discussion list.

Sometime afterwards I was contacted by the historian for the Scottish Deerhound Club of America, Clay Finney. Mr. Finney, whose first Deerhound was descended from one of Mrs. Huntington's Stanerigg dogs, wanted to let me know that hers was not the first Deerhound kennel in the States. There were a number of kennels active in this country in the 1800s, long before Stanerigg. He also shared with me some wonderful photos from the Huntington archives, which he allowed me to share here.

This first one is Anna with a group of her hounds, taken in 1939.

He also included this one with a rider and a pair of Deerhounds. I had assumed this was Anna's husband, Archer Huntington, but I realize now that the photo is not identified directly.

I've had a lot of reason to think of Mr. Finney's kind note these last few months as I have worked on the horse color books. The information I had on the Stanerigg Kennels came from an old newspaper article that was part of an exhibit on the Huntington dogs. It illustrates the problems of dealing with contemporary references from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Information was often rather carelessly assembled, and once printed often got repeated endlessly. It has been shocking to me to see just how many equine texts from the late 1800s simply lift whole sections from previous publications, without regard for copyright. What's worse is that these are often presented as first-hand accounts. For a researcher, this is maddening. As a person whose livelihood is so closely tied to issues of intellectual property, it's depressing.

So while I have obsessively checked far too many small details - which explains my absence and distraction of late - I am pretty sure errors will slip through. My experience with the Deerhound post is that sometimes a mistake is the best way to meet someone with new and interesting information.

Spring renewal

2010-05-03T07:39:00.003-04:00

I apologize for the lengthy hiatus from blogging. All my writing energy - really all my energy - has been spent on the color books for the last few months, and the blog has suffered.

I am stepping away from book writing for a little while to attend to neglected projects in the studio. The book will benefit from me getting a little more perspective, and I sure will benefit from spending more time with the mud! I also have some long-neglected posts to make here, including a correction and some cool historical photographs a reader shared with me.

Updated Color Charts

2010-03-16T22:41:00.003-04:00

I just posted and updated version of the breed color charts on the website. It is still not complete, since there are colors (like Pearl and Dominant White) missing. I decided not to overhaul the charts now, since there will be so much more information in the books anyway. But I have tried to correct any outdated information, and add what new information would fit in the chart (mostly in the form of "extinct" colors rather than newly found ones).

Preparing a new plaster mold (Part 3)

2010-03-08T08:48:00.006-05:00

The only remaining pieces (aside from the large side) are the two back gusset pieces, which are tinted pink in this picture. These two pieces are designed to lift up with the casting, with the horse balanced on top like a pedestal. This is the way most horses are removed.

The two front gusset pieces came away really clean, so they didn't need an adjusting.

But while the first side came off easily and the two front pieces came away clean, the casting was still a little too soft to be considered leather-hard. Normally I would set everything aside at this point to let the casting firm up a little. That's because to break the seal on the other large side, I'm going to need to rock the casting a bit, and I don't want to risk collapsing the barrel, shoulders or chest. But since this casting is already lost, I went ahead and tried to remove it to show what happens when a casting is removed too soon.

Not only was my guy too soft to retain his shape as I jiggled him, the clay on the other side was still wet enough that it hadn't fully released from the mold. That pinned him in at the top if his shoulder and the point of his hindquarter. (You can also see the cloudy film the release residue has created on the surface of the clay.)

Here he is on the gusset pedestal, showing how pulling the casting while it was still pinned to the side pieces caused the piece to rip apart.

The two bits of stuck clay show where the casting had not yet dried enough to release from the mold. Fortunately it was the clay that was too damp, which is relatively easy to clean up with a fine (dry!) sponge. If the mold itself had still been damp, it might be impossible to completely clean the clay from the mold. Patience really is one of the most important qualities in slipcasting!

Even though my casting was badly damaged, I was still able to wiggle the two back gusset pieces free so that I could check for flashing. Sure enough, both hind legs had scraped clay showing where I needed to correct the molds.

It's hard to believe that a casting like this is a success, but it was because I was not after a usable bisque. What I wanted was information, and this first casting provided it. By looking at how the casting was going wrong, and adjusting the mold pieces accordingly, I was able to fix the mold so that future castings were easy to get.

Here is the second casting from that same mold, poured to double-check that I caught any potential problems. As you can see, the mold is clean and he came out whole, so I can declare this a working production mold.

Preparing a new plaster mold (Part 2)

2010-03-06T11:33:00.008-05:00

I've lifted the first large side piece from my mold, so now I can start removing the inner pieces. The first one that comes off is the handmade neck-and-shoulder insert, since it partially covers both the ear piece and the first front leg piece.

Pieces are designed to be removed in a specific order, and to be pulled in a specific direction. For this one, it pulls upward and slightly to the right. (If it could have been pulled straight upward, there wouldn't have been a need for an inner piece, and the head and neck would have been included on the large side piece.)

The dark areas are where the slip seeped out the seams. This tells me that I mixed my slip a little too thin for this particular mold. I also have just a little bit of clay scraping on the forelock, so I trim those areas. The clay that seeped is cleaned off with a soft makeup sponge.

This is a good shot showing why the first casting isn't used. The white areas along the jaw, lower neck and shoulder are from the mold release. It usually takes one or two castings to remove the film the release leaves behind.

The next inner piece removed is the one between the ears, which I often call the "hat". Unless a horse has mane obscuring the ears, he always gets a hat. It pulls perpendicular to the ears, and this has to be done with care since it is really easy to take an ear off.

Each time I remove a piece, I am checking it for any areas where it is scraping off a layer of clay. When I find them, I use the hook tool to carefully trim the plaster flashing. Once the pieces are cleaned of any excess clay, the are reassembled alongside the other half. This is especially important with minis because the mold pieces are often small and easy to misplace. Once the mold has dried, pieces cannot be repoured, so a lost piece is a ruined mold.

Usually at this point, there are a number of options for removing the horse. Some separate out from the other large side piece, balanced on the remaining inner pieces. Sometimes a few of the leg pieces pull out first, then the horse and remaining inner pieces pull from the large side. Finn was designed to pull with all four gusset pieces still attached to the casting, but it turned out that the two front gusset pieces will fall off freely without removing him.

If I had been smarter, I would have seen this and designed the frontmost gusset (encompassing the chest and part of the front legs) as a "slider" that pulled away without lifting. As you can probably see from this and the previous pictures, there is an unfortunately placed mold key sticking up in the way. That's because I didn't realize this would work better. Molds are always like that; you see better ways after you have worked with them for a while. Even so, the front gussets on Finn tend to fall free with a little helpful wiggling.

That's good because the next part involves freeing the rest of him from the other side piece, and having his entire chest area to leverage makes that a lot easier. And anything that makes that part easier is a good thing, because it's the place most castings are lost. I'm going to lose this one on purpose, just to show why that is. (He is unusable as the first anyway, so he might as well serve as an object lesson.) I'll explain that in the next part.

Preparing a new plaster mold (Part 1)

2010-03-05T09:49:00.017-05:00

Having just finished a new plaster production mold, I thought it might be helpful to see how a new mold requires adjustments to work well. Production molds are made from the rubber master, but like anything handmade, each one is a little bit different. If I've learned anything in the last few years, it's that there are no perfect molds and each comes with its own quirks.

Unfortunately, you don't really know what you are getting until the mold has dried, which can take weeks. In the picture above, I've opened the new mold (for the drafter Finn) for the first time and am dusting it with a soft brush to remove any dust or dirt.

At this point I check the mold for obvious flaws like these bubbles in the mane. Textured areas like manes, tails and feathering are prime locations for these kinds of problems.

I use a small hook tool to remove and smooth casting bubbles. This particular mold only has the two bubbles. I've found that I rarely get bubbles with new rubber masters, but after a number of production molds the masters tend to pit. This pitting can result in bubbles in the production mold. Fortunately the problem is easy enough to fix.

Once this is done I am ready to pour the first test casting. This casting is not usable, since there is usually a bit of mold release still in the design cavity. It's sole purpose is to check the mold.

Here I have poured slip into the closed mold. Those straps holding the mold together are heavy-duty rubber bands. I need to keep it constantly full (like the top picture) because the slip in the pour hole creates the pressure the pushes the liquid up into the horse's legs. (Remember that the pour hole enters the belly, so the horse is being cast legs-up.) One of the hardest lessons to learn about casting is that this is not the time to multitask. Do not go do anything else! You will lose track of time and find the pour hole drained and (later) a horse without toes. Not fun.

The slip sits in the mold for a while, forming a skin. When I started casting, I wanted hard rules about how long the slip should sit. What was frustrating is that there were no rules. It depends on the mold, and the thickness of the slip, and the local humidity, and other mysterious factors I just haven't figured out yet. The only way to know it's time to drain the mold is by spilling a bit of slip out, and testing the thickness of the skin with a plastic mold trimming knife.

When the skin is the right thickness, the mold is turned upside down to drain. At this point you should have a hollow pony inside the mold - sort of like the model horse version of a chocolate Easter Bunny. (I have always wanted to put those yellow candy eyes on one...)

Here the mold is sitting upside-down on two plaster pedestals to finish draining. (The pedestals were made by pouring excess plaster into the bottoms of some plastic cups.)

Now there is more unpredictable waiting. The time it takes to get the casting to the right 'leatherhard' consistency is dependent on many of the same factors as the draining. Unlike the wait for refilling the mold, this is actually a really good time to multitask. Pick loooong chores. That's because no matter how soon you think the casting will be ready to demold, it is probably not ready. I hate to admit how many castings I have lost to my own impatience.

Molds are almost always designed to have a specific piece lift first. For Finn, the piece that I am holding is the first. I've taken off the rubber bands and removed the pour spout with the mold trimming knife (the blade is there just to the right), and am testing to see if it is ready to pull. When the horse inside is dry enough, the mold piece will pull, though there is often a soft "pop" as the suction is broken. If the side does not separate (at least a crack), the casting is still too soft.

It won't always pull completely free, though, at least not at this point. That's part of what this first casting is checking. There are almost always small areas along the seams where the plaster wants to grab the clay, and that will often pin the mold piece in place. The trick is to wait until the mold will crack open easily, but won't pull further. By carefully forcing the piece off, the clay will give and stick to the areas that need adjusting.

Here is that first piece with the tell-tale clay on the outer edge of the tail. Left as it is now, the mold will always want to hang there. When flaws like this happen in the wrong place, the demolding process can tear the casting apart. That's not likely in the case of the tail end, but leaving it would mean that part of the tail will have to be reconstructed each time since it would get scraped off with each demold.

It's better to just trim the excess flash from the mold so the tail pulls freely. Imperfections like this one are easy enough to fix.

But not all problems can be fixed. There is a chip in the piece along the shoulder (marked in the previous picture) that happened when the shoulder insert was broken from from the side piece. Fractures like that often happen where the sides butt up against a hand-formed piece. There isn't really a way to fix it, so each casting will have a larger-than-usual seam along that shoulder that will need to be trimmed. Fortunately trimming seams is pretty easy with greenware; far easier than with resin castings.

So now the casting is visible and I am ready to start removing the rest of the mold pieces. Like the first side piece, these are usually designed to come off in a specific order. I'll pick up there with my next post, starting with that inset shoulder piece that caused such problems when it separated.

New horses for 2010

2010-03-01T11:07:00.005-05:00

I have been dying to be able to announce these two new pieces ever since last Mayhem, when Sarah first showed them to us while they were still in progress. Sarah has more information about "Elsie" and "Oliver" on her blog, and as she mentions the two will be produced in earthenware here at Blackberry Lane.

These will be the first non-mini edition, and I am excited about the opportunity to work on a larger 'canvas'. I also have a soft spot for broodmares. When Sarah explained that she wanted to do a set that touched on the universal theme of motherhood, I was sure I wanted to produce them. Even so, I wasn't really prepared for how much these two really resonate with me.

Which is probably a good thing, because while their "story" makes my heart sing, that mare's tail is making my mold-making mind reel! I have no doubt that we'll get them translated into ceramic, but I suspect they will make for some interesting blog posts before it's all over.

Just call me Gimpy

2010-02-28T14:35:00.004-05:00

I meant to send a post before my surgery, letting everyone know that the posts to the blog might slow down a bit for the next few weeks. Unfortunately getting everything in order so that I could take six weeks off took more time than I expected.

But just so readers know, I went in for foot surgery this past Friday. The doctor shortened one of the bones inside my foot, reconstructed the damaged joint, and secured it all with screws. At the moment I am pretty much confined to the sofa, which is probably just as well since I am pretty heavily medicated. (The instructions on the prescription bottles say I should no operate heavy machinery, and Alan insists that includes Xacto blades.) Hopefully by the end of this week, I'll graduate to crutches and then a bit later just an orthopedic "boot".

Although posts to the blog will likely slow down, I had a number of older topics that I took pictures for but never got around to posting. I'm going to try to get some of those up in the next few weeks. These are older projects, so they might seem a bit out of order, but they have some useful information.

I will also be posting about the new editions from the studio for this year. I might be sidelined at the moment, there are a lot of exciting things planned for the near future.

Thistle auction

2010-02-18T12:46:00.006-05:00

There are more pictures of the claybody custom Highland Pony mare, "Thistle", on the website now. (There is a second page of pictures that is linked to that page.) Her auction page is up on the Auction Barn here, though it doesn't go live until 8pm.

She'll be the last piece from the studio before I go on hiatus following my surgery, but I'll explain more about that in a later post.

Snow day!

2010-02-13T08:00:00.005-05:00

We got our second snow in as many months. Three inches fell overnight, so it's still sitting undisturbed (aside from a few bunny tracks). In a few hours, it will be covered with sledding tracks and converted into snowmen. Like this guy from a few weeks ago:

There he is guarding my mailbox with his nerf sword. I thought the "angry eyebrows" were a nice touch. Of course, Emma would point out that he is facing the wrong way. Evil brown delivery trucks approach from the other direction.

But for now there is a view of pristine snow from the studio window (that's the window visible to the right in the first picture). It has been a good morning for working on the blog index, which is now up on the website.

Organizing it made me realize just how much information has accumulated here on the blog. I was also surprised to see just how often I posted about mold-making, since I don't consider that to be my real area of expertise. I am, truly, still learning that skill. But it is true that the best way to learn is to teach, so explaining the process has really helped me to better understand it myself. I was also surprised to see just how often horse color has creeped in, because I had decided early on that the blog would be about the studio, and not about my research. I guess the two things are more intertwined for me than I realized.

Hopefully with the index the information posted in the past will be more useful to others. I know it's going to help me remember what I have already talked about here, and what hasn't been covered and might be new and interesting. After more than three years, the real challenge is not to repeat myself too much!

As promised...

2010-02-10T12:12:00.005-05:00

This time it's a shiny Highland Pony. This is "Thistle", a claybody custom sculpted by Sarah Minkiewicz and glazed here at Blackberry Lane.

She'll be headed to the Auction Barn late next week.

The fun part

2010-02-09T20:04:00.005-05:00

I want to thank everyone who wrote over the last few weeks to encourage me to publish the horse color book in its entirety. I am still not sure how that will work from a logistics standpoint - publishing the book in two volumes seems to be the most likely route at the moment - but I have decided that it will contain everything that I know on the subject of breeds and their colors.

I also decided that I needed to make an effort to include more photographs. Even with the planned illustrations, there is just a lot of text. Walls of text. So I've been reaching out to people with photos of unusually colored horses with the hopes of including them. It feels a bit like a scavenger hunt, which has been fun. ("Got a true roan Shire? Check!")

The photo above is one recently added to my "have permission to use" list. It's a particularly striking example of silver dapple in the Highland Pony. My friend Caroline Jones took the shot and agreed to allow me to use it and several other pony pictures for the book. It makes me wish that the body of the book was being published in color, but even in black and white the color on that mare is hard to miss.

It's the color I keep envisioning on Sarah MB's Halflinger mare, maybe because it reminds me of the Miniature mare that Sarah, Joan and I visited during Mayhem one year.

I've also had Highland Ponies on my mind because I'm about to list (at long last!) the second of claybody customs that Sarah and I did, and this next one is a Highland Pony. She's a silver dapple dun gone grey, and like the mare above she's just full of dappley goodness. As soon as the Charlotte weather gives me something other than dreary overcast skies, I will post teaser photos.

The book

2010-01-29T04:48:00.004-05:00

Much of my attention lately has been taken up with working on my horse color book. It's a project that I've been working on, on and off, for years. I decided last year that it really needed to become a priority, or it was never going to be completed. I set a target of having it ready in time for BreyerFest 2010. It will be the 21st BreyerFest and the 15th annual North American Nationals, and it seems to be shaping as an informal "old timers" reunion. Knowing that my friend Ardith Carlton will be there (with her own book on artist Julie Froelich) has given me a little additional incentive.

The manuscript is still far from finished. Whole passages are rough, and the text is peppered with little side comments about facts that need to be double-checked. (I live in fear that one of them will escape the editors, and the book will be printed with something like "surely this color notation is wrong - check!" somewhere in the text.) It was close enough, however, that I started testing formats and book sizes with the hopes of finding a good fit - and getting a page estimate.

I suspected the book was running a little too long. Unfortunately for me, my suspicions were off. It wasn't running a little too long; it was running way too long. I ended up with an estimate of close to 800 pages, and that was just the text. I was only just starting to work on the illustrations so they were not factored in to the count. Not only is number of people that interested in horse color rather small, there are page limits on perfect binding. So I am mulling over my options. Do I drop the rarer breeds? (Does anyone really care if the Asturcón are sometimes chestnut?) Do I pull out some of the specifics and publish them in a separate appendix? Or do I break the whole project into two or more volumes?

So those are the things I am mulling over, all while I am laughing at myself. This was supposed to be the small book - the "easy" book - that I published before tackling the "real" horse color book. How long could a book on the history of color in the different breeds be? I would write this short one, and then tackle the harder "everything I know about identifying colors and patterns" book later. I should have known that I don't know how to do short and easy projects.

But I have been encouraged by these old printouts I found while going through my old notes. They are from the first horse color seminar I gave. The date in the corner is 2001 - the same year that my youngest son was born. He was five months old when I gave the presentation. Somehow I managed to complete the whole thing, including more than 30 illustrations, in just a few months with a newborn in the house. If I could do that, I should be able to make this book deadline standing on my head. At least, that's what I am telling myself!

And this time around, I have much better tools. I used illustrations when I did the presentation in part out of necessity. It would be too difficult to track down the copyright holders for the photos that I would need to illustrate my points. I also thought that whimsical ink and marker drawings might make the subject matter a little less intimidating. It worked wonderfully.

Except that it was time-consuming. I reused the lineart, as you can see with the stock horse that modeled the pinto patterns, but I had to ink it each time. And the colors were limited. I left out the (then newly discovered) champagne gene because I could not find the right shades of taupe! If only I had known how to make digital images, I could have save myself a lot of effort.

And that is what I am doing with the book. Although it will have photographs, my experience with the presentations taught me that sometimes the most helpful image is a drawing.

For this project, I only have to ink things by hand once. Here is one of the inked line arts that I will be using in the book. There are several different ones that are posed according to what parts I might need to illustrate. This one is for large body pattern illustrations where the face markings are less important. There is one with a dramatic head turn for when I need to show what is going on with the face.

Here the ink drawing has been scanned in and I've started inking it electronically with my fancy new Intuos4 tablet. The original ink lines (now a light gray) are still visible under the darker digital ones. After that has been done, I'll be able to create a template of not only the lines but also the basic shading. That will give me a base that can be used for making multiple illustrations more quickly.

Being such a visual person, and being able to make whatever image I think might clarify the text, probably isn't going to help my page number problem. So I'm setting the book and the drawings aside for a week or two, and returning to the studio. I find that sometimes answers come after I let a problem sit for a bit while I immerse myself in something completely different. Perhaps an inspired solution will come to me while I erase hundreds of little dapples!

The learning curve

2010-01-24T07:16:00.006-05:00

One of my tasks this past week was to pour a new Finn mold. Finn was the first horse produced as a Blackberry Lane edition. He was also my first foray into molding a full-body horse. I didn't make him alone; Joan made the rubber master while I watched and tried to absorb the process. I then brought the master home with me (much to the alarm of airport security in San Diego).

The training wheels were off, however, when it came time to make the plaster production molds. That's the first one I made, pictured up there. It is more than a little inelegant.

As I showed with the step-by-steps on the Imp mold, sometimes the master mold isn't a straight-forward representation of the plaster molds. For complex pieces (and we don't seem to make any other kind!), it's often necessary to make some of the interior pieces by hand. In the case of Finn, his ever-so-slightly turned head made it necessary to create a separate piece that covered the right side of his head and neck.

The trick with handmade pieces is that you have to envision how they work with the rest of the mold, and you have to do it on the fly because you are shaping the piece as the plaster dries. (You are also simultaneously trying not to get air pockets on the design surface and not spread too much plaster on the finished areas of the mold.) Needless to say, as the picture above shows, I did not get it quite right the first time. I ended up with an interior piece binding against another, which meant one edge fractured as I took the mold apart. Usually that just means you have some ugly flashing in one area of the casting (which works as a great reminder, every time you cast, of what you learned).

Unfortunately with this particular break, it also meant that when I poured the slip down the belly, it came right out through that little gap in the top. Of course, molds of new releases are never made except on a tight deadline, so it had to work anyway. You can see the staining where I have used blue and sometimes brown plasteline to plug the gap. It works, if more than a little imperfectly.

I made another mold a bit later, and it doesn't leak. But it's hardly much prettier.

It was interesting, then, to return to the master this past week with four years more experience. (Four years and a crash course on molding really difficult horses!) Of course, having a better sense of the word 'undercut' makes a world of difference. But there are little things, too, like not pouring the plaster too soon, or knowing just how much to jiggle the air bubbles out without shifting the rubber legs. As the picture shows, the 2010 mold is much cleaner. It also took a lot less effort.

I have been thinking about this kind of issue a lot lately. Those of us in the model horse community who work in ceramics have seen a marked increase in people wanting to learn various aspects of the medium. There really isn't any getting around the fact that that almost every aspect - molding, casting, glazing - has a really steep learning curve. It's made me think that to some extent, the most useful trait for someone taking up ceramics is just sheer stubborness.

My gambling problem

2010-01-12T14:25:00.003-05:00

My family has had a good time for the last few weeks, teasing me about my "gambling problem". That's because PayPal froze my account on suspicion that I was running an illegal online gambling operation. So my father now refers to me as his "bookie" and asks to "put some money on the ponies". Fortunately I was able to convince the customer service representative at PayPal that what our community refers to as a lottery isn't really a form of gambling. My account was restored, but I was told I would need to remove all references to "games of chance" from my website.

I'm still not sure how this is going to change how I sell my work, but it's clear that whatever is done the website needs to be changed. I'm using the opportunity to reorganize the site and do a few updates. I am not brave enough to do a complete redesign, but I hope to give it a little more logical structure.

With that goal in mind, I have been working on a blog index of sorts. I've had the blog for three years, and have generated hundreds of posts. Some of them are even useful! I've tried several times to get Blogger's tags to work so people can better find the useful ones, but tags continue to allude me. So I am working on a page for the website with links to blog posts by topic. That way those looking for them can find all the posts on moldmaking, or all the posts on horse color, or glazing, or treehouses and catapults.

Brrrrrr!

2010-01-08T07:10:00.002-05:00

I knew there was one potential flaw to moving the airbrush station to the garage. The garage had the space, but it wasn't heated. I'd been really optimistic that my high-powered space heater would keep the area useable in the winter. What I hadn't counted on was the unseasonably cold weather we've been having. Even with the heater running, the workspace out there has barely gotten above 40 degrees most days this week.

I decided this was nature's way of telling me that it was time to clean greenware. It's not the most glamorous part of ceramic production, but at least it can be done in my warm studio!

It's probably just as well, since the spray booth has been taken over by the guys and their Pinewood Derby project. It's probably not obvious from the picture, but this year's car is going to be shaped like a giant red Lego block. Thankfully Alan wrapped the booth with newspaper, or I'd be doing the rest of my painting (when it finally gets warm enough again) in a glossy red booth.

We really needed the spray booth a few years ago, when my older son was working on both his Science Fair project and his Pinewood Derby car. His experiment involved finding out if crickets, which are apparently omnivores like people, lived longer on a balanced diet of healthy food or soda and pizza. (For my friends who are parents, you don't really want to know the answer...) Since I am notoriously bug phobic, I insisted that the crickets live in the garage. Brandon and his father built an elaborate plexiglass enclosure for the two groups, and set it up in the corner of the garage. Unfortunately, it was the same garage where we'd later spray paint the Derby car. I can report that while crickets actually do quite well on pizza, they aren't at all compatible with spray paint fumes. Every last one of them was belly-up within the hour! It wasn't a sight to give anyone a lot of confidence about breathing the smelly stuff.

It did make me happy, though, to see that there was almost no smell this time around. I wasn't willing to bring in any test crickets to be sure, but it did seem that the only odor was coming from the paint on the car itself. Surely that must mean the booth is working for me, too.

Wrapping up and moving on

2010-01-05T05:56:00.005-05:00

I was able to reach my goal of wrapping up the "Inspire" project before the start of the new (work) year. With luck they might even reach their destination before January 6, which is the twelfth day of Christmas. Each year I cut it closer and closer, which makes me think I need to give in and just say I send Valentine's gifts!

I did learn quite a bit, which is one of the benefits of doing these kids of projects. This was, for instance, the first time I had used a spray gun to apply an art glaze. That was one of the benefits of having the new spray booth. It certainly is faster than using sponges, which was how they were done before. What I didn't count on was the waste involved due to overspray. I had mixed a teal glaze (to the left in the picture above) that I wanted to use for all 25 tiles, only to run out half way through. I didn't want to delay things with a wait for more glaze, so I did the other half in a true green. Next time I'll know to mix a much larger batch for this kind of application.

I still have more plans for "Inspire", including the original purpose as a trading card. But working on those will be more like working on regular horses, since the materials are the same. After weeks of looking at teal and green, I'm ready to return to the world of silver dapple leopards and chestnut roan sabinos.

That meant cleaning up the studio, which had slowly been trashed by each step in the process of making the tiles. It reminded me that I wanted to do a more serious reorganization of my work space later this spring. Ten years of ceramic work is starting to show in the accumulation of mostly-worn molds, not-really-moist-anymore clays and glazes of questionable attractiveness.

I look at these shelves and remember telling Joan, back when I started, that I had no real interest in making my own molds.

These are the other things I've accumulated. The bottle to the right holds all my spent #11 blades. I started tossing them in the glass bottle thinking that it was a good way to dispose of them once it was full. I have no idea how many blades are in there, but it is 2.5 lbs worth of Xactos. Two and a half pounds of scritching! I guess it's safe to say I'm not inclined to developing carpal tunnel.

The second container holds all the used bars from my kiln. Each on represents a separate firing. It stopped being representative of all the firings done in the studio when I added the smaller test kiln, since it uses a Bartlett controller instead of cones. That's the kiln I use for most of my bisque firings, so it gets a lot more use than the big one. Still it's a fun reminder of how much use the kilns have gotten since I set up the ceramic shop. I have always thought that once it was full, I'd hold a guessing jar contest. That might be a ways off, though, since I've only managed to get it 3/4 full in ten years.

But massive studio reorganizations will have to wait until spring. For now I am just happy to have my countertops back.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-25T18:33:00.002-05:00

This little guy decided to spend Christmas dinner with us. He found that if he pushed on one side of the ring of ice inside the birdfeeder, it would tip and he could reach under and get the sunflower seeds. Emma was thrilled that we had installed the Squirrel Channel for her to watch, since we didn't seem inclined to share any holiday ham. (I suspect she would have been more interested in the squirrels than the ham, even if we had offered!)

So with all the festivities coming to an end, I went ahead and drew for my Hobbit Birthday giveaway. The winner was Teresa Fedak, who chose either a dappled buckskin or dappled grey. It was interesting that the most popular requested color was red silver, which was one color I hadn't though of doing yet. Thank you everyone who posted to the comments or sent in emails. It brightened an already lovely birthday to hear from so many!

I will post this guy when he is finished! In the meantime, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas filled with family and friends, and a prosperous and happy New Year!

A hobbit birthday

2009-12-24T13:30:00.004-05:00

Today is my birthday, and true to the Hobbit custom of giving gifts to others on your birthday, I thought it would be fun to do a giveaway.

So here is the idea. I will be giving away the first realistically glazed "Inspire" trading card, and I'm going to let the winner pick the color. So if you'd like to enter, you need to either send an email (the address is on the website) or you can post here in the comments section. What I need is your name and the color you'd pick if you were selected. Your color choice will need to be pretty general, like "dark dapple grey" or "bay tobiano", but beyond that I'm open to most anything. Late Christmas day I'll randomly draw the winner.

Best luck to all who enter, and may everyone have a holiday season filled with friends and family!

[Edit: My email has a rather quirky spamblocker, so don't worry if you get the message that your entry has been blocked. I've been checking the filter and moving anything over, so it won't get lost!]

Production delays

2009-12-22T09:44:00.004-05:00

Nothing messes up getting new molds into production like damp, rainy weather. I had almost forgotten this possibility, and was sure I'd get my Christmas gifts completed early enough that I wouldn't have to claim my "Episcopalian Exemption". (Episcopalians observe the twelve days of Christmas, so our holiday season runs until January 6.) After weeks of rain - and a little ice - it didn't quite work out that way!

But the molds are truly dry now and I'm really pleased with how they have been casting. I haven't gotten a chance to do a realistically glazed one yet, but I've been experimenting with the colored glazes. Each piece is different, so it takes a few tests to see which glazes are flattering. When I sculpted "Inspire", I envisioned the horse in realistic underglazes and the background in colored art glazes. That's not practical for my Christmas list (even with a 12-day extension!), so I needed to find a workable colored glaze. The horse is a bit problematic because he's not textured enough for the commercial art glazes, so they tend to pool irregularly along his neck and shoulder.

It's had me thinking about tiles and what glazes work best for me. I've long been enamoured of the bare stoneware and oxides that fellow tile artist Melanie Brooks of Earthenwood Pottery uses. I love that look, but I've come to the conclusion that my own sculpting style isn't bold and chunky enough for those treatments. It's tempting to come up with some designs that would work, but I am afraid those will have to remain things I muse upon while I finish up these pieces. Once they go out the door, it's back to casting, cleaning and glazing three-dimensional horses!

Getting back to Imps and Vixens is my next project. I've told my husband that his next project is to make some small wooden easels. Either that or I'm going to have to find somewhere that makes smaller acrylic ones!

A simple solution

2009-12-11T09:32:00.004-05:00

One of the first slipcast copies still attached to the plaster mold.

After playing around with all the variables trying to get level tiles, I found what turned out to be a pretty simple solution for this particular piece. The slipcast tiles weren't really warping too badly, so all they needed was a bit of extra weigh to hold the thinner corners down.

It turned out the these small magnets were perfect for holding down the corners. They weren't heavy enough to damage the leatherhard clay, but they were enough to keep the tile from warping.

I moved the tiles to my workbench to make them more visible. Normally they dry on a sheet of drywall, but the gray color made them hard to see in photos. I was tempted to use a cookie sheet so the magnets really held, but it turned out that the weight alone was enough.

I knew when I had to buy a package of 50 magnets just to get the two my son needed for a project that I'd find some use for the rest. I just never imagined they might be useful in the studio!

Curls

2009-12-09T11:18:00.007-05:00

Mattie, my youngest son, at age 4.

We are usually pretty partial to curls around here. They are rather appealing on small boys, at least. Sculptors from the turn of the last century must have thought so, too, because Brookgreen Garden is filled with sculptures of curly-haired toddlers.

Newly pressed tile (left) and partially dry, curling tile (right)

Curling is not so appealing on tiles, though. I'd almost forgotten that curling was the bane of many tilemaker's existence. I know the rules for avoiding curling, of course. Don't make overly thin tiles. Don't make rectangles. Don't have large differences in thicknesses.

I had skirted the edges of those rules often enough with no ill effect, that I guess it was only natural that I would forget them. Now I am paying the price with rows of "Inspire" tiles that look like potato chips.

So it's time for some quick problem solving. I think my problem is the big difference in depth at the horse's shoulder. (At least, since I broke all the rules rather blatantly, I think that's the one doing the most harm.) I have tried some of the normal approaches to the problem, like covering the newly made tiles so they dry slowly, but I'm not sure any of them are going to fix the issue completely.

I originally thought that I might do better press-molding the tiles since my early attempts at those were relatively flat, but as the above picture shows even those are warping a bit. I might still have to make this work, since most of my production molds haven't dried enough for slipcasting. Press-molding allows me to get more pieces from a given mold each day, and I can use the molds a little sooner. The downside is that the moist clay used for this doesn't capture the detail quite as well as the slip. Of course, these guys are getting an art glaze so I suspect the slight difference won't matter compared to the loss from the glaze.

But for the long term, I need to work out the curling problem for the slipcast pieces. I have reconfigured the pour holes for the molds. I think that being able to drain the thickest part - so the shoulder area is semi-hollow - might fix the uneven drying.

On the upside, I was able to fire one imperfect bisque to see if I calculated the shrinkage correctly. Sure enough, I have a 2.5 x 3.5 trading card.

I can also use my imperfect tiles to test glaze colors. It's just a few weeks away and I still haven't decided what color these guys will be!

The other positive is that with all the frustration with curling, tackling some of the more difficult passages in the horse color book has seemed downright inviting. Yesterday I was able to knock out the section on palomino "Arabians". I still have a long way to go, but I've begun to hope that I might make my BreyerFest 2010 publication deadline.

Chachki show prize

2009-12-03T11:18:00.003-05:00

I posted a sneak peek of this prize for the Blab Chachki Show before, so I thought I'd add one of it in finished form. It will be heading off to the winner of the China Workmanship division later today.

I am also going to try to do something for the upcoming Christmas holiday. Since it's also my birthday, and since I've always like the hobbit custom of giving gifts to others on your birthday, I thought it might be fun to do a giveaway. It's been a while since I did one on the blog. I still haven't decided just what, but I'm going to try to come up with something!

So close...

2009-11-23T14:03:00.003-05:00

"Inspire" is almost done. He still has a few bald spots (still trying to decide the best direction for those strands) and I need to add the inner curve to the top right border, but I am so close. I probably won't post again until there are glazed versions. Not that there's much surprised left to him, after so many detailed posts about his creation!

And as many of you who have followed this blog for a while now have already figured out, I am utterly incapable of multi-tasking. It is really difficult for me to put a project down and pick up another. So everything in the studio ground to a halt while I worked on this sculpture.

That meant that I didn't get my claybody custom photographed and loaded up to the Auction Barn before the holidays. I fear I missed my window, since many people find it hard to bid on items close to Christmas. I think I will hold off on the auction for a little while, but I will try to get her pictures up. She's too cool to hide away just because I got distracted.

It wasn't just the studio that has suffered from my obsession. The holiday baking hasn't been started. My family is beginning to wonder if I plan to feed them, or just show them a few more strands of clay horse hair!

A new approach to adding the hair

2009-11-21T08:19:00.007-05:00

Like I mentioned in the previous post, I dread manes. It takes a bit of playing around with them to find something that works for the design, but all the adding and removing and editing invariably damages the underlying sculpture. Of course if you sculpted it once, you have the ability to do it again, but I hate the lost time. In the past what I have done is take a design up to the point where I am in the above picture and then cast it. After that I would clean up a casting, fire it, and use it as a base for sculpting the mane. (Like this.)

This means the original goes through two shrinks; one when it is cast and made into the background for the new original, and a second when the final casting were made. What I've learned from shrinking down originals to create smaller versions is that there is a certain amount of distortion that amplifies with multiple castings. I wasn't confident that I could just enlarge my design 12% to account for the two shrinks, and still come up with the required trading card dimensions.

That and my unwillingness to sculpt manes on a soft surface was a limitation I needed to overcome. I needed a new approach.

I decided that part of my problem was trying to design on the fly on the non-hardening clay. I needed to do more of my design work on paper before I approached the clay.

So what I did was take a picture of the hairless design (that's the picture at the top of this post) and print it out in actual size. I also dropped the opacity of the image to 70% so I could better see the lines I would draw. From there I started sketching in the mane. These weren't the general direction lines I had used before, but a blueprint of exactly where the strands would fall.

My goal was to confine my redesigning to erasing pencil lines, rather than removing clay. But even more so, what I wanted to do was more accurately replicate the feel of my linework in my sculptures. My drawings have always had a softer, wispier feel that I had wished was more evident in the manes and tails of my sculpting. The sculpted versions always looked clunky in comparison, at least to my eyes.

I thought that perhaps if I drew something specifically intended to be sculpted from, I might begin to see what was getting lost in the translation.

Using the drawing, I sculpted exactly what I had drawn directly on the printout.

After the basic shapes were in place, I used Goo-Gone and a paintbrush to smooth the surfaces. This was a leap of faith because I had foolishly not thought about the possiblity that the solvent might melt the ink (or the paper) until after I started brushing it on the surface. Surprisingly, Goo-Gone doesn't do anything to ink jet printouts.

Obviously the strands aren't in their final, polished form. All I really wanted was to capture the larger shape and movement. Once I had that, the paper and clay were all placed in the freezer. I had used NSP Soft so that it would blend well (and not take a lot of tool pressure to detail) once it was added to the horse, but that meant the clay was much too soft to maintain its shape without freezing it first.

It worked! It took a while, but a day later the bits of mane were stiff enough to pop off the paper backing. It was a bit like placing little mane stickers on the horse.

Here are the first handful of bits I placed sitting on the rapidly defrosting horse. I eventually put them all in place, but the design was too cold for them to stick. I had to let it thaw a little first, then gently press them down.

The mane still needs a lot of cleaning up and detailing, but it's all in place. The whole design, with all the mane bits, is back in the freezer for the moment. I need everything to firm back up so I can do the final shaping of those mane pieces. After that it's just a bit more detailing of the strands and I'll be ready for the final pre-casting inspection.

Together at last!

2009-11-18T19:29:00.007-05:00

I have the horse and the background where I want them, so the two pieces are finally ready to merge together.

My first step will be in getting a truly accurate outline on the recessed area that holds the horse. I'll do that by punching a pin along the outside edge of the horse, much like I did earlier with the text. This will let me trim (or fill) the recess to fit the slightly changed horse.

Once the horse fits properly, I'm going to need to anchor it down a little. I've had trouble with it shifting a bit, which wasn't a problem since I was just checking the design. Now I'll be filling the miter between the two pieces, so I'll need the head to stay in place.

The only places that aren't finished off are the edges near the shoulder, so that's where I'll pinch the clay down. I'll clean this up and bevel the edge to match the rest of the card.

I originally thought I could shape the recess to form the intended outline before the horse was added, but it became clear to me that I'd have more control over the line if I did it with the horse there. I set about adding the outline to the neck since it had the simplest lines.

What I didn't anticipate was that the line wasn't giving me the effect I had in mind. Instead of highlighting the horse and jumping him off the design, I found it was distracting. I tried adding it just to the areas with the textured background (the top of the neck, front of the face and understand of the jaw) while leaving the muzzle flush against the plain background. It still looked distracting.

I think I am going to opt for a gently sloping curve to the areas where I have a line now, but I want to set the design away and sleep on it. Looking at the problem with new eyes is always a good idea. I suspect that one of the ideas I was most attracted to in the beginning may well not work this time around. That's not a good enough reason to include it, though. Knowing when the throw something out is as important as knowing what needs to go in.

Either way, after tomorrow I should be ready for the hair. I should add that I dread hair, and dread adding hair against a background most of all. So this part could get interesting.