More Pottery- Florida Native Plants

I have a commission to do a set of plates depicting Florida Native Plants, and ones that are found easily in our area, SW Florida...The rims and backs will feature my typical borders and patterns: .. ..the centres will feature 1 or 2 native plants in a natural setting, sort of botanical, with a Florida landscape depicted in the background. Charming!
This is a Loblolly Bay:

The larger plates are quite big 11.25" and the smaller ones are 8'' or 10" I think, which nestles nicely inside the larger, and the 2 rims complement each other.

Bomba is SO helpful.

This is a fun project, and the plates are turning out really well.
You can click on some of these images to larger!

Wild Sunflower

Railroad Vine and Beach Morning Glory (unfired):


Horse Tail:

Lizard's Tail and East Palatka Holly.

This is Coral Honeysuckle:

The Beauty Berry plate turned out particularly well...here un fired

And here, fired.

Sadly, in the firing, there has been some breakage... I am extremely upset and don't want to talk about it.
However, that's pottery! Firing is a crazy thing, and I have always been very fortunate, and consistent with my results...

and I don't get much breakage.... maybe I will learn something from this event....in the meantime, I take a deep breath, maybe several, and prepare to re-do a few of these beautiful plates, and in the end, look forward to it, since they are most agreeable to work on. It's not really the end of the world, like I thought it was at first.

Pottery update!

Its been a very busy couple of weeks....I have been too busy MAKING to take time to WRITE.. and more importantly, to PHOTOGRAPH. These are very quick and casual photos... I haven't had time to slow down and set up a nice photo for this pottery... I will later! I always regret later, not taking to time to document the work as it gets done. But it is tedious.

In these photos you can see a mixture of projects from these fresh water fish vases (the one with the handle formed into a hole is very exciting... a perfect set up for water and fishes... think SURF!

And here are just 3 of the pretty pastel and bright bowls made to add to an existing collection... I have painted many of these this fortnight!. Check back soon for more pictures of them!

And here are the teapots, and the butter dishes in the same style and colours... the butter dishes were painted to match pretty much exactly the existing one, as shown in the previous post... well, I think I managed that quite well.

Pottery Projects Finally Get Going

As I mentioned some months ago, I have a large variety of pottery projects planned since December. Finally I am able to get around to them!

I have been looking forward to this work. I love painting the pottery, mainly because its so exciting to fire and see what comes out, hopefully something planned for.

This bowl is one of several to match the bowl in the photos, painted by me some time ago for a client.
The teapot is a variation on a previous teapot, (you can search 'teapot' in this blog and maybe find the one I mean)
The butter dish is being painted to exactly match the one shown in the foreground.

These are little tapas/snack plates for a set of 12.

They will have a bright green background when fired.

The faithful Bomba is always there to help me with my pottery.

........................................

Well, no he's not. This is his table most of the time, when I am busy in the other studio, he gets the whole place to himself. I have to negotiate the space with him now. He looks resigned to it. I am too.

Painted Planters

Here is an interesting project :paint up these terracotta planter pots to give them a little pizazz. I used paint for painting cement, which should offer some extra adhering qualities.I also used some cool metalic in the recessed areas of the pots, to add to the sense that these are now objects of great antiquity, made of fantastic enamels, glazes and precious metals(!) You can see many of these pictures larger by clicking on them.

It was a lot of fun working with the bas-relief areas, layering a lot of paint, and making it look like mineral build-up, and drips.

These pots will be outside, most of them under cover, on patios, but even the ones out in the weather should hold up fairly well...and as they endure the elements, further weathering will probably only make them look more interesting.

I was particularly pleased with this sideways leaning pot. It was more of a challenge, since it didn't have any raised areas, so I had to do much more to make it interesting. And it now has a lot of character.

Some of the pots had cement screed dropped on them, from construction on the site where they where kept before I got them to paint. I was able to knock some of it off, but the cement that would not knock off, I painted brilliant gold, and then "aged" it, so that it looks like real gold was carelessly dropped on them.