annie singletary ceramics

my image taking setup.

very ghetto but  love it. not only can i hide from my 3 yr. old son so he’s not curious about all of this, but it’s quite quaint.

the backdrop is from www.phototechinc.com

i use the gray to black backdrop.

The light box is made from foam core and fabric backing.

The bulbs i use are 300 watt and i set my white balance on my camera using a gray card.

I use foam core with fabric backing to diffuse the light defusers.

a friend just told me a new bit of advice about using foil on one side of object instead of a light on either side. this help take the glare away.

I’ve been using a clear glossy glaze and this is causing a lot of hot spots (which is the glare).

Can’t wait to try this new trick. thanks Joy

A few new pots.

I’ve been working on creating depth in my surface without overwhelming the detail in the form. I am having so much fun playing with some white gold  luster and these precious little floral decals.I have loved English china for a long time and am finally getting an element of what i love so much about it; the small details that give intimacy to a piece.

I’m trying to work on taking my images with this glossy clear glaze without getting

I have been also using some new colorants for my slips. I ordered from US pigments and found some really great deals on some pretty expensive mason stains. I’m excited to get them in the mail, but in the meantime I am using some that were given to me a while ago, like this orange shown above. This new color really gets me excited about Fall.

i’ll let you know about the mason stains, the prices seem almost to good to be true.

check out my etsy site: new pots up for sale www.anniesingletary.etsy.com

I’m settling into my studio quite well. I was told to not be surprised by it taking a bit of time to get used to things and start making work that i am excited about.

Making my glazes and getting all my chemicals into their 5 gallon buckets was quite a task. I think I’ve been spoiled by having the nice glaze bins at other studios, because a 50 lb. bag of chemicals does not fit into a 5 gallon bucket. Somewhere throughout the years i had thought they fit perfectly. Apparently I was wrong. But, it’s fine, I just have about 1/4 of a bag left and they are rolled up tight. Hopefully Will won’t get into them out of curiosity one day.

The sink is in and the water. Do you see that in the picture below. It’s beautiful. I was desperate to get going glazing so I made 2 of my glazes with the hose outside. Glad to have water inside now so I can use warm water. I really like to mix glazes with warm water as it helps them settle in….I’m sure there is a scientific explanation but i will just be simple about it.

Speaking of simple, nice transition huh. I am really excited about simplifying my designs a bit. I am using a clear glaze that I have found to be quite perfect, it’s called Kate the Younger Clear. I like to fire to about cone 5 1/2 and it works well with that. No crazing and no pin holing. Being a clear glaze, it really needs to have these qualities for my pots because I want the body of the pot to show. The lines that I do at the wet stage show up really well in this glaze. It brings out the slip decoration really well too. I’m working on simplifying the patterns and cutting back my time of working on each pot. Between the colored slips and clear glaze I think I’m headed in a good direction.

I’ve also included pictures of some patterns around my house that I have brought into my work.

I used to paint all my patterns with glazes i made and commercial glazes then wax resist them and then glaze the pot. Now, I can do most all the work at the wet stage, which is called the green stage and is my favorite time with the clay. Then I can use this clear glaze and another clear with a little bit of titanium dioxide, which will be in another post specifically about glazing. I’ll put the recipes in that as well.

Whew! and most of this during 3 to 4 hr. nap times for Will. my new motto, “sleep will sleep”.

Thanks for reading.

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The first bisque kiln was a success and thanks to my sweet husband taking my son for the day,  i glazed up some tests for some new satin semi-opaque clear glazes.

So, now I was able to get to some cleaning and organizing…honestly my favorite things to do.

After having moved studios several times I have managed to collect quite a lot of things. Test tiles galore for one. These are a fraction of the tests I have, however I only could keep a few strands of these because i could only find the lists for some, about from 2007 to now I have well documented tests. Before that I was so all over the place, from celadon to shino to terra sig. So many of them were not recorded, how sad this was to look at. I’m glad I now have a very diligent system of writing on the actual test tile, this way there is no loss of paper.

Then on to my art school portfolio. From appalachian and unca, whoa. Not sure why I still have all of this, maybe i was keeping it to remind myself why i chose clay as my medium.

I decided to document some of these, since record keeping was on my mind. These were some of my better ones but i def. know why i chose clay. I miss having to push myself in drawing, I love to sketch and am religious about my sketchbook, that is definitely something that i acquired in college. I really believe that all of the drawing and painting classes and learning about the figure helped shape my eye today with clay.

This is an excersize that i can’t remember the name of. It was so fun, I still do this occasionally. You cut out pictures from somewhere and then paste them on a sheet of paper, then you draw to connect them in some way. It was always so fun to see what can form out of these random images.

Here’s to all the pages and pages of drawing paper that i and people like me have gone through.

I’ll be writing soon about my glaze tests. Hopefully there is some goodness!!!