A lot of my inspiration from art comes from nature and science, so I incorporate trees and plant designs into decorating my pieces. I am also fascinated by the human eye because it conveys so many feelings. I like to combine these two elements in abstract designs. I never used to plan out my designs before, but I am now learning to in FA 102.
For doing the detailed black outlining on these two bowls, I used a method call slip trailing. Slip is basically liquefied clay with color pigments mixed in. You apply it with a squeezy bottle with a very thin tip so that lines come out thin...kind of like puff paint. You do this before you fire it the first time when the clay is in its "leather" stage (hard but not completely dried out yet). When it comes out of the kiln it is not shiny, but it is cooked into the clay so that you can paint and wipe off glazes without the initial design coming off. After you fire the first time you can then apply glazes. For the bowl with the eye I decided I wanted the bowl to be a matte white, while the design of the eye was to be shiny. We had black glaze in a squeezy bottle to make designs, but for all the other colors I used a small brush to fill the designs in. It was quite a task finding all the colors I wanted as well as the test tiles to see what color the glaze would turn out, but I liked the results. If you think making color swatches with just gouche is hard, then glazes are on a whole other level. It's amazing how many different types of glazes there are. Some are transparent and can be layered, while others are opaque, while others have speckles or crystals that react in the kiln. They are a lot of fun to play with though. If you have time you should definitely take a ceramics class.
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