Week 6 - Fluffy clouds and Trees

Did a bit more painting this week - a second coat on the sky to make the colour more opaque and I also used a wet in wet technique to put in some clouds. The sky will remain quite simple as the mountains beneath it are so busy and textured. I also made a start on the tree section to get some darks and lights blocked in. So far so good...but the trees are going to be a challenge I think!





And at the pottery studio, I experimented with a new technique (well new to me, it dates back to the 1780's) called Mocha which was supposedly developed in the UK around stoke-on-trent. The name is supposedly derived from the word/town of Mecca, where a semi-precious agate stone was traded, which has a similar fern-like vein structure on its surface.

First make a mix of oxide (pottery's version of pure pigment) with an acid: we used vinegar.
Then apply watery slip to some leather-hard clay. Drop the oxide/acid mix into it using a brush or eye dropper and the fern like forms appear like magic! Thank you Gill for the tutorial!





Dragging a tool through the pattern to make a swirl


Other tests with different thicknesses of slip.


A fired mocha bowl with a thin transparent glaze - the pigment used was the same as our tests, a bright blue.



And a few of my pieces came out of the kiln form their first firing.
Test tiles:


3 larger tiles, (sorry the scale of these photos is messed up).
I will need to do some glazing tests next week and work out what sort of glazes I am going to do on them!

All of these have a sort of 'bi-sected' theme to them.