A contest over on A Plate A Day

I'm holding a small contest for plate #200 on A Plate A Day. Leave the url(s) of your favorite plate(s) in the comments on the post and you could win the plate above (a finished one, which I realised I had not yet posted to this site). Multiple submissions are welcome. Cheers!

And! It's absolutely fine to plug your own plate. Go for it :)

The end

I love Hannah's writing, erasures and all. She did this wonderful header for my Open Salon blog and I'll have to redo the plate above, this time without filling in the letters (I got lazy). Methinks we're finally at a point where I can give her a pencil and have her draw directly on a plate ('ll do the underglaze work). Should be a fun series :)

Bunny

I was working on a fabric pattern and thought I'd quickly place this on a plate to see how it looks. Not entirely sure about the feet, but I will refine later (puppy is due in a week and I think I'm quietly losing my mind).

Pears

Still very much snowed in but here are a couple more, taking off on this series. I'll take these into the studio this week and see how they fare with a single firing (eep). The low-fire glaze we've been using is just wonderful and soft, so unlike the hard shellac of the high-fire glaze on the earlier plates. Glazing always trips me up, so it's nice to see something come out right.

I'm being optimistic with that underglaze pencil coverage on the first pear above. The pencil sits on top of the bisque and doesn't cling to it, as with paper for instance. So I'm fairly sure the glaze will lift a lot of that away, and that's fine. It may make more sense to do that sort of drawing on dry greenware.

Bear plate, part 2

A single firing worked, but not for the old drawing I washed off, much of which remained in the background. Although I can see how that could be useful.

Rubberband

Bear plate

So I'm going to see how this works in a single firing, instead of the 2-phase process I currently use. It will smear a little (or a lot) but that seems fitting for this series. The pencil lines and all that background noise will go away with firing.

Bear drawing

So much better. Let's see how it translates to underglaze.

Bear

Hannah is addicted to stuffed animals, and I'm constantly finding them lying around, so I thought I'd start a new series, but I don't think I'm there yet. There's something about the line which isn't quite right, and I'll experiment with an underglaze pencil next, if I can get it to hold a point, that is.

A little time off

A Plate A Week will be updated infrequently, between now and April, while I finish up two other projects. I'm going to try for at least twice monthly, but there's also the small issue of my amazing day job. It should all be more manageable by April, perhaps earlier, but for now I do need to shift gears a bit.