Enjoying a little TEXTURE TUESDAY today with this beautiful & fiery glass mosaic!

I’ve always been intrigued by old-school glazed bricks… especially when they’ve survived in fairly good condition on old city buildings. These ones are particularly cool on a special ST. PATRICK’S DAY today!!!

Well, we’ve waited a very long time for Spring colors to start coming back… I’m tired of Winter’s grays & browns! But in this case, I had to drive all the way down to St. Louis to see some Spring flowers just starting to bloom! And I’ll take ’em… and try my best to bring some color back to Chicago too!!

Some times you’re just driving down a sidestreet… minding your own business…. you run across an EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY! I just love this collection of handmade & handpainted birdhouses all over this tree! Just a normal house… with some AMAZING little houses hanging in their tree!!! So cool… so creative! What a great collection & fun for the whole neighborhood!

It’s Underglaze Madness!!!

So we’ve seen a recent interest & surge in underglaze transfers around Lillstreet Art Center! Tons of students are starting to use these pre-made, commercial underglaze transfer sheets to add some surface decoration to their pots. We’ve had some recent discussions on whether these transfers are “cheating” or not?! I’ve also enjoyed watching some of my students trying different techniques to modify or use these transfers in different ways.

In my Intermediate Wheelthrowing class, Darcy has been using a lot of underglaze transfers on her work. We’ve all sort of fallen in love with this great mandala pattern.

We’ve also been giving her a hard time… by telling her how much better they would look if the back & white mandala were painted-in with bright colors! You know, kinda like a little paint-by-number fill-in situation. Luckily, also in this class is Christine who is all about bright colors & underglazes. Sounds like the perffect match, right?!

So we keep teasing Christine that it’s HER job to paint these in… and that’s going nowhere fast. Christine is not bowing to any sort of fun peer pressure!

But then Darcy came up with a great idea… and a fun challenge. She offered to make some basic cylinders, and then let us decorate them with colorful underglazes… and then she would put the underglaze transfers OVER the colored underglazes. She offered it up to our whole class… but only Christine & I took her up on it. So we each got two cylinders to decorate as part of Darcy’s challenge!

So my thought was to sponge-paint some blended colors onto the cylinder that might “mimic” and possible align a bit with the underglaze transfer.

And Christine went a different route with her ombre’ blend of underglazes. She had chosen a different pattern for her underglaze transfer… so she wasn’t as concerned with her pattern “matching-up” with the transfer pattern. Instead she went with two different ombre’ blends.

Luckily

Luckily, Christine has a great assortment of underglazes that she has tested, tried at different firing temperatures and made amazing test tiles with. Thanks to Christine for sharing her high-fire underglazes… and for letting me use her colors for this fun little challenge!

After a couple layers of underglaze, we both called the “done” for our part of the Darcy Challenge!

And then Darcy came in later that night and added the underglaze transfers OVER our underglaze paintings! Pretty impressive… I think they look pretty great so far. Can’t wait to see what they look like after firing and a light layer of clear glaze to really make the colors pop!

Thanks for the challenge Darcy!!!
You know how much I LOVE a good challenge… and having people prove me wrong about the underglaze transfers being a way of “cheating.” I might need to reconsider when these come out of the kiln???

Once the twist was revealed, my LILLSTREET THROWDOWN students had a half hour to paint their handbuilt fruits. Their clay fruits looked great without color… but the underglazes really brought them to LIFE!!!

Colorful fun… colorful reflections… yummy gummies!

You gotta love it when the sun comes streaming through your window catching a Christmas crystal and making mini-rainbows appear in all the right places!

Waiting for a delayed “L” train… getting the blues?!

We recently got some “real red” slip at Lillstreet. Some of the kids used it during Summer Camp, but we haven’t seen it being used much on “actual” pots! So I’m pretty intrigued & excited about how the red slip reacted in my soda kiln! I’m loving that the color stayed vibrant & red… but also has some cool flashing effects where it changed around the mug where the flames & soda hit the slip. This was just my first red slip mug… I’m sure there will be more!