A bit too long

This is a bit longer than I meant to leave in between posts, especially as I have thing to blog about.  I got all the pieces I made over September and early October bisque fired and are now sitting in two boxes in my kitchen awaiting glaze materials and then firing.  I went into University to get them fired as my kiln still isn't in the position or being run but hopefully it will be soon.

At the moment it is looking like we will take over the unit on the second week of November and then will be working quickly to get it open before December to start teaching and get some money into the business.  It will be a fast and furious few weeks with family helping getting it ready.

On the 25th September we went to the Wales Contemporary Craft Fair in Betws y Coed, it was a nice warm day and thankfully didn't rain on us which I am glad of,  there were a lot of other people moving through and looking around.  We didn't get as much chance to talk to other stall holders as we did in Bacup.  Following are two pictures of myself and my wife at our stall in Wales.

Our next confirmed event is the  Greenland's Farm Village as shown on the poster below.  Hopefully more news to be added soon, and I won't leave it as long in between posts again.

Now and Then

This weekend I am off to Cymru Contemporary Craft Fair in Betws y Coed, this week I have been making more plinths for the work to sit on.  Excited about going but we have an early start to get there as we are travelling all the way from here in Thornton in my friends car, packing that morning then trying to get there on time.

I went into Uni this last week to find out which supplier they user for there materials and the head of course had put up our newspaper article on the base room door which is now shared by the 3D Design Students, which is going to make everything a bit too tight for work space, I'm glad I have finished, though I miss having those steady days of working and easy access to kilns and glaze.

Recently as I have been drawing to develop some new work, I have found myself thinking of my old art school days. I only went to art school for a year, and dropped out after the first year as I was then old enough to be a mature student and had a good enough portfolio to move on to greener grass(or so I considered at the time).  I learnt a lot at art school but never  work out how to apply most of it to personal work.  I have two examples I did recently below as my old sketchbooks are in a bedding box under all my second year ceramics work.

This was an exercise we did on the first day in technical illustration we had to learn how to shade, we did shading like this on proper work later on but or course a bit more controlled using straight edges.  When I was in my second year of ceramics I was obsessed with textures and incised the clay with various textures but it never worked how I wanted it to. I also tried dripping slip, tearing pots in half and all sorts of things to create textures.

Our technician at UCLAN made some really nice textured pieces in porcelain, he would make a tall cylinder, dry it with a hot air gun apply a glip(part slip part glaze as he would put it) then stretch it out until it was a bowl.  They were really nice pieces and one of the very few things he marked as his own work.

This is a continuous line drawing, my life drawing tutor showed us these, he said he did them in art school and then used to calculate the length of the line.  He described it as taking a pencil for a walk, the pencil lines aren't supposed to ever cross or leave the page, back at school I did two or three myself in my A3 sketchbook, this one is only A4 so it would fit on my scanner and took me ages to do, I almost gave up half way through but decided to at stick at it.  I have used continuous line drawings when doing sketches of people on the bus, train  etc, which I need to do more of.

Generally I am unhappy with my level of drawing skills and have been spending a lot of time on it recently from drawing buildings, to people to anything I can when I am out and about with the little one.  My other passion asides  pottery is concept art for films, and games particullar the work of Erik Tiemens whose work is a real inspiritation behind my painterly style.  When I was at high school it was his work and that of Doug Chiang that I wanted to imitate but didn't do art and when off to University to study Chemistry which didn't challenge me how I wanted it to.

Pottery and drawing challenge me every day as I know I don't have the same natural talent for making things as I did for maths and science.

New Designers - A London Exhibition

I went to New Designers this week, it is still on until 4pm July 4th at the Business Design Centre in Islington near the Angel subway station.  It was different to my degree show as there wasn't a way that I could sell to the public directly as there was only limited space in the van, so everything in the next few pictures was all I had with me.  It was so hot down in London that some of the things we attached to the walls fell off over night.

We were up on the balcony and took an extra board to help the whole thing seem a little more enclosed.  Our work seemed so much smaller here than it had in Preston, there were a lot of people passing by and now I am out of post cards so I am going to get some new ones printed this week.  Our technician had met with us in London and was helping us organise the space, though our head of course who was taken ill just before the degree show came down to see us on the opening night.  Kevin Millward who taught me for a few weeks finally got to see some finished work as it was just going into the kiln on the last week he was in Preston and told me which pieces of my work he liked and those bits he didn't.

Our stand was on the right hand side by the stairs that go up to the higher level, on the lower level that you can see here was filled with textiles stands, there were 80 all in all compared to the 19 ceramics and glass stands.

I have been off of University for over a week now, it is hard not being able to throw while I have been off as I have been so busy with other stuff that doesn't really relate to making. I have been putting together my business studies portfolio, just need to get some info on insurances and then write the feasibility study along with all the proformas for the work. Going on a course run by the local council this Wednesday.

I am still looking at various locations for opening the business, but I am now putting it aside in my head for the moment until I have at least made all the work for the degree show.

This Summer as well as having the Degree show at Preston Uni which opens to the public June 14th, though the preview evening for that is the 11th, I will also be going to New Designers and will be there for the preview day and the 1st of July our stand is CG16 and is up on the balcony near the stair case. Also I am going to the Super Duper Itsy Bitsy Handmade Fair 2010 held by Blackpool Council in Stanley Park on July 18th, it should be fun, even if I am the only potter there I have to raise my profile locally as well as in the south.

On a separate note my wife has started blogging her blog can be found here


Here are some pictures on the way I start trying to design.

I start off just looking at various shapes on a very small scale, just a really small thumbnail not taking any time over these as it is about looking mainly at the silhouettes.

Just taking a design from the small drawings and filling an A3 sheet the shape in different proportions and looking at adding handles and spouts, my thinking is that these would make interesting tea or coffee pots.
Just starting to look at things a bit more graphically, trying to work out how I would decorate it with the cross hatching and the black boxes are something to help the shape stand out more against the paper and something we used to have to do when I was doing illustration though we used to take more time over the boxes than I have doing the whole drawing here.

These pots are as of yet unresolved even though they are one of the first designs I came up with, as I don't have the skills to really make something like these them being so wonky and asymmetrical.