G.C.S.E. Art prep works

Next week the students take their Art Exam. This year is exciting for me as in previous years all students have painted and drawn in the exam, clay work was not even considered, however this year is different.
Alongside the drawings and paintings students will be screen printing using batik methods and working with clay during their exam! Ive been involved with all these processes in recent months so I cannot wait to see what they do next week!

Here is some of the supporting work done by one student who is looking at contemporary weaving from Artists such as Ann Richards and Laura Thomas and my work to do her research on, we have used feathers to imprint into clay and made ceramic buttons to thread in with her raffia weavings, its all shaping together well for her, she has decided to make ceramic buttons during the exam and then make the weaving and after they have been fired and glazed she will thread them onto her weaving at a later date.
Here is her supporting material.

Fresh from a difficult firing.

Here are some of the ceramics I got from the kiln firing over the weekend. It was a frustrating firing as both kilns decided to play up.
 I initially decided to do a smaller firing in the little kiln so that I could get a couple of big orders approaching the dispatching date out to people. 
Since offering wedding favours at a 4 week turnaround I've had to step up with the firings and organising my clay making time, not a natural state for me, yet I hate to let people down.
The small kiln decided to fire itself up to 300c within an hour, leaving the majority of clay work in pieces, (devastating!!) After leaving it to cool down I cleared up and retrieved some of the work in the same condition and loaded it into my big kiln. (I was too annoyed for picture taking although in hindsight I wish I had)
Then the big kiln let me down as it reached 1000c (I needed it up to 1250c) fortunately it was the switch tripping out because one of the cables had corroded. Fortunately my man with his practical skills sorted it out for me so the kiln resumed its firing.

Student Clay work

The Art rooms have been very busy with new clay work from the yr 10 and yr 11 students.
The work in the photos below are yr 10 clay tiles, ideas are in abstract forms from their own personal projects.
Pieces have been bisque fired then fired again with stoneware glazes and glass shards from recycled wine bottles inserted into the recesses.
Amazingly only 3 glaze colours were used on these, the varied colours are due to different coloured glass onto of these 3 glazes.

I will be firing more this week so I will post more photos soon.
x
View more ceramic and glass melt projects here.

Fired on images The results.

My last blog post was an experimental firing about using ceramic images to fire onto my work. I promised an update and here it is:

Here are some of the pieces, prior to firing, still damp after the transfers have been applied. 

Loaded into the little kiln once the transfers had fully dried.
Lid shut, here goes a 4 hr firing to just 800'c

These are the pieces (much like when they went into the kiln, except the images are now part of the piece (fired into the clay/glaze instead of sitting on top)

Feathers featured on these glazed planters.

Here are some of the failures, not certain why these transfers didn't take but I have a feeling they work better on a smoother glazed surface, on the bisque or matt surfaces they seemed to flake away.

However on the whole each transfer fired on well and is definitely a permanent solution to transferring images onto my work.

Fired on Images. A New Project!!

I have been wanting to fire on drawings and images onto my ceramic ware for ages, but there does seem to be an awful lot of rubbish transfer sheets that just don't withstand firings and the paper is so costly that it makes it so unaffordable to experiment with this technique; then there is finding the right laser jet printer with the correct amount of oxide to print onto, it is a minefield.

There are several ways to apply decals/transfers/silk screens onto ceramic ware so I decided to do my proof sheets of images and drawings and get them sent away to a company called Foto ceramic who do all the techi stuff for you.
It has saved a shed load of hassle and I received my printed sheets a day later, so I was good to go with the first firing (all be it an experiment in itself)

Here are the sheets:

These are the original sheets with my doodles, drawings and images on them that were resized and sent to Foto Ceramic.

A day later the sheets arrived through the post printed onto the ceramic paper.

Then I had to carefully snip around each image as I was warned some of the background paper colour may show through after the firing and I didn't want that, (I am after less transfer look more fired into the piece, if that makes sense.)

After cutting each one out I placed them where I wanted them on these pre-glazed and bisque test pieces. I also used them on a few ceramic buttons I had left over from a Christmas stall. As this firing was an experiment I wasn't sure if these would look any good, so I fired the kiln half full.

These are all ready to pop into the kiln now ready to be fired.
I will post the results soon when the kiln has cooled.