The final set up of my studio for my assesment, wish me luuck!

Demo for mono print

Preparing a sheet of glass for a black mono print board.

Rather a good amount of a mixture of under glaze black mixed with water and give the sheet of a glass a good enough layer of the mixture with a brush.

Dry it with an industrial dryer. and the pitch black colour turns a dark shade of grey as it dries off..

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and there is a grey for you!

The under glaze on the glass sheet has to be bone dry before it can be used for mono printing.

Put some tissue paper on the glass.

secure its position with maskin tape.

You can now draw onto the tissue paper and it'll work as an tracing paper kind of thing because of the black on the glass. I don't have the pictures of the procedure after this for I won't be using mono printing in my project. After you have drawn on anything you want to on the tissue paper, all you have to do is keep the bottom side bottom and lightly smooth it onto a wet bit of clay without trapping any air in between them. 

The end of my narrative project..

Putting wire branches on the raku fired branches went very well as I thought it will. Bellow are the 3 branched that I had made for the 3 big ripples that I made.

The only thing that didn't quite go accordint to plan was the size of the hole I made in the ripples.

I was a bit too small to  fit the branches into it so I had to hold the branches above the ripple and connect it with a glue gun,

putting some support at the back..

It looked a bit out of place when the glue was showing so I covered the glue with some wire and all was well after that!

and these are how it turned out at the end, I'd haev to say I am very very happy with it!! :)

This is a little piece that I made of the "sequence" Idea that I had. It was very quick to make so i thought i will just throw it in there

Demonstration for the Dremel

Dremel is a instrument that you use when there's sharp edges of glazes sticking out of a piece. You use the Dremel to gride down the sharp bits. It smooths it out and also makes it less noticable that there's a thing sticking out of your piece.

Hopefully I would be using this instrument less ans less as time goes by for I will get better(or start, and lear, rather) at stacking kilns but as for today, I had about an 1/2 hour to an hour session with this little drill.

what the Dremel looks like whe first taken out of the box

You change the head of the Dremel to a Grider. It looks and sounds like a dentist when it's on.

*YOU MUST WEAR SAFETY GLASSES WHEN USING A DREMEL.

The procedure of using a dremel is quite simple, all you have to be careful is not to put oo much pressure on your piece for it might snap on you.

After wearing a safety glasses and not putting too much pressure on the thing, all you have to do is slowly grinde away the little edges that's sticking out all over the place.

Decal demo

Although I'm not using any decal for my project, I thought it'll be a good idea to document it non the less. the series of photos shows how you go about with the process.

Well, before you can do any transfering of images, you first have to send of the image that you want to get transferred and wait until it gets back to you..

When it arrives...

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You first cut out the image that you want to use off away from all the other ones. Carefull not to cut off too much or too little off the page, as you can imgine, the image wouldn't be exact if you don't have a carful hand.

You then soak the piece of transfer in water

You know that the transfer is ready to use when the little page straightens out in the water and doesn't roll up into a tube anymore.

When the transfer is ready, you pick the piece of paper out of the water.

You place it on top of where you want the image to be, and slowly pull out the paper our from underneath the blue bit of paper.

[*You can only put transfers onto a glazed surface]

and there it is that you can see :)

You have to make sure that you have all water getten rid off from under the blue. Using a rubber kidney probably is the easiest way to do so.

Also, the indentation in the inside of the bowl makes it hard to not to distort the image, however, if you're careful and gentle enough, you'll probably be able to succeed on beign a neat freak.

Our Tutor gave us another demo for the transferring straight after the last one for it was hard to see the inside of the bowl for some poeple. This time he used a flat based thing so everyone can look at and document what is going on.

Getting the decal ready

Placing it on top og the glazed surface of your choice.

Slowly pulling the piece of paper from under the blue part..

Carefully...

At the end, if there's any bits sticking out of the glazed surface, scrape the sticking out bits off.

After this demo, our Tutor told us that he doesn't quite like decal firing, and I agree with him on this because I don't see how slapping on a picture onto a piece of Ceramic is that much fun when you could instead explore and have fun with glazes and paints and things that'll actually come out from your own self. However, that is that and this is this. I'd say I will try out some Decal firing in the next couple of years, and you can't deny something when you haevn't even tried it yet. 

The head project, finished product

and this is how Cait's head turned out at the end

:)

I'd have to say I am very happy with it

Raku fireing

 I already have tons of notes on Raku fireing on my journal from the elective, so I am just going to put a couple of pictures up here..

Taking pictures of my Tutor gettin the bin ready for all the ceramics to be chucked into while we wait for the kiln to open up.

Wet some Newspaper

and rap it aound the top of the bin

The whole way around.

This is to keep the bin air tight so the smoke created when the piping hot raku pieces gets in contact with the saw dust wouldn't get away on us so it'll stain our pieces better.

For the Raku fireings for the elective, we only used 1 kind of saw dust which was the normal saw dust which you can see below.

However, for our discipline's, we mixed in 2 more different kinds of saw dust into the one above to get more smokes going. These 2 supply of saw dust apparently were given by one of the fashion Tutors who built a house recently. She has more then plenty of saw dust lying around the place that she is willing to give away!

Kiln dried saw dust

Very finely grated saw dust, according to one of the lads in my class, probably a hard wood, maybe mahogany or something.. To be honest, I haven't a clue what it is, and frankly, as long as it does the job, it's grand with me.

After a while, out comes our little babies out of the kiln!

The lovely Tutor of ours opening the kiln for us. I tried opening it myself as at one of the firing that we did, that stuffs pretty heavy

You can see the glaze on my ripples are green from how hot it is..

There goes one of my Ripples into the bin!

and there's one of my big ripples!

Someone chucking some saw dust down the bin after our babies went in there.

Then the bins are left aside to smoke the ceramic pieces up and to cool down a little bit.

After about half an hour, put a heavy duty pair of gloves on and go fishing in the bin( Must wear the glove cause the saw dust is still piping hot at this stage and might even catch fire when exposed to oxygen). When you do find some fish in there catch it and rerease it into a bucket of water.

lettin' 'em chill.

My Tutor doing some fishing.

The pieces that came out of the kiln that day

Out of which that is mine, 1 big ripple, 2 small ripple, and 2 small ripples with whols

Big ripple angle view

The thickest branch of mine

The branch turned out way nicer than I though when it came out of the Raku firing. The metalic shine on it gives me a inpression that it'll probably look very nice with wire, which is a great thing for I was planning on creating little branched coming out of this thicjk branch! :)