Process

The process of throwing, Page One

Here are some photos of how my ceramic pieces are produced. Here you can see how I produce a piece, from a lump of moist clay to a finished piece of dinnerware. These pieces have been decorated with the leaf-motif that you see on my ceramics page:

A slab of moist porcelain is cut into four sections. I mostly use a very fine cone 10 porcelain.

The pieces are shaped into balls....

.... and centered on the wheel. "Centering" is one of the most important and difficult parts of learning to throw on the wheel. Especially for porcelain; because any wiggles or wobbles that are in the piece at this stage will certainly be in the final cup! If you want a straight, symmetrical cup, you have to start with a well-centered piece of clay.

The piece is shaped into a cylinder; this will be a cup, so here is the basic shape of the final piece....

The four pieces after being thrown into cups.

The piece, after a little trimming to clean up the shape, is covered with a blue slip. "Slip" is basically a liquefied clay body, to which pigment has been added. These cups will be decorated using a "masking" technique... the blue that you see here will be the color of the final leaf shape.

The cups have some leaves impressed on the surface....

The cups are then covered over with a black slip. The leaves on the surface mask the black slip, preventing it from covering the color. After drying for an hour or two, the leaves are peeled off...

(note in the foreground of the first picture, you can see a bowl decorated in the same fashion).

After peeling off the leaves, the color underneath is revealed, completing the design: