Little sketches

Physio on my shoulder is going well, the nerves are less pinched, which means I am doing silly little sketches again as rehab.

Nothing spectacular, seriously, it still hurts to hold a pen/pencil longer than 10-20 minutes, but here are a few little sketches I spun out and gave a quick colouring job in Photoshop.

I don't know why, but when I'm doodling, it's usually odd little critters/beasts that come out... I think the fire dog-thingy is kinda cute :) He reminds me a bit of a French Bulldog. No idea what the dragon-morphing thing coming out of the cloud is, I was just randomly making curling shapes at the end of the wave that turned into a cloud that turned into... rain that turned into... a beastie. Yeah, no thought at all behind that one ;)

The green & yellow floral thing was a fast/simple design that I may want to put on baby-gift-related something-or-other in the future.

The green singer/castle/wave was sketched after I wrote this little bit of flash fiction and considered (for 5 minutes) of making a short graphic comic/story out of it. I still might, one day.

The mouse... yeah, y'know when I was playing around with creating designs for (potentially) an interactive/app-type kids book? I've got a rough script for a mouse story in my head as well, essentially two mice 'fighting' each other with imagination.

Anyways, nothing I spent a lot of time on, but it's nice to hold a pencil again (for short spurts), even if my control still sucks too much to even consider picking up a paint brush :)

...good thing this old soccer injury/pinched-nerve thing doesn't affect typing skills or I would be absolutely insane by now with zero creative outlets...

Triangular ceramic box

Was over visiting a family friend's place recently, and saw this:

It's something I made in university. After I fulfilled all the requirements for my Honours Degree, I needed (essentially) 2 more classes worth of electives. So, I took a condensed ceramics class in the summer, partially because I've done all kinds of ceramics work before so it would be easy, and partially because it's a heck of a lot of fun, and after packing my schedule to complete my degree in just under 1.5 years, I figured my final class/credits should be enjoyable :)

The project requirement was to make a slab box, which means rolling (with a special roller) out thin sheets of clay, cutting them into geometric shapes, and scoring/wetting the edges to build a box. Generally this works best when you use 90 degree angles

Every person in the class built a square/rectangular box, maybe 2 or 3 put a lid on theirs.

Since I'm never satisfied (well, let's me honest... it's that I'm not interested) in boring/status quo things like that, I built this odd little triangular box/dish which is wider on the top than it is on the bottom (so, no 90 degree angles were used) and sculpted a fancy little handle for the lid.

 The lid sits in place on three extruding triangular pieces, so air is meant to get inside.

...and because I do like making things look nice, I angled the points so it fits softer in place, and pressed three triangular impressions on the 'feet' of the lid and also inlaid them with glaze.


It was kind of fun/nostalgic to see this sitting out on display, and nice to know she liked/likes it enough to keep it out.


I know I've got more pieces, but they're in boxes, tucked away to survive the next time I move.

Piggy banks stage 6: first layer gold linework

With all the lustres set, I took a few hours to design the inner pattern for the white areas. Since my friend who was expecting the girl was due first, I concentrated on finishing the Lotus pig up first so, hopefully, I would know the gender/name of the second baby before I had finished the final firing.

 I toyed with multiple ideas for the top of the Lotus Pig (if you click on the picture, you can see each petal has different designs). In the end, I kind of free-handed some lotuses for the wrap-around, and did bubbles in the top lotus petals, which softened up the rigid design a little, and a ring of seeds in the centre around the coin slot.

...time to crack open the Liquid Bright Gold...


Because my arm was giving me major problem (shaking so bad I was trying to eat with my left hand instead of my right), I thought it might be easier to use this strange sort of pen instead of a brush as, after all the work so far, I didn't want to ruin it all with shaky/messy linework.

The pen is really cool, you can see it below. It's like an open ink-pot where you put a couple drops of gold in the top of the little brass(?) head, and it feeds down through the bottom. You can use nib-type pens as well, but even after practicing with them, I couldn't get a consistent flow, which was both frustrating, and the lines were ugly.

Because this particular Liquid Bright Gold went on gold/yellow coloured, I switched to a red micron pen so I would be able to see better than if I had used a black pen.

The process went reasonably well. Yes, all the red are the lines I drew on first with the micron pen to make sure everything was lined up/even.

I also did the Sleepy Pig, but somehow forgot to take pictures...

...then I fired it overnight, the day before I had to leave to go home.

...and what was the result?

BOOOOOOOOO! The gold was contaminated! It ended up black, and smeared/rubbed off when you ran your finger over it.

Now, either the gold in the bottle was contaminated, or the pen I used had some kind of residue... I did clean it thoroughly with turpentine first... but, y'never know.

So, an entire day wasted, and I had to go home. At this point, it was late October, and the first baby was due end of October...

I was rather upset... and my arm was in pretty bad shape.

Piggy banks stage 3: red resist

Once the designs were on, I needed to red resist the areas I did not want lustre to touch.

If you remember from last time, I did not think about the Micron pen being so easy to wipe off. Due to this, whenever my brush would touch the lines, it would smear and I was worried that the result would not be crisp lines after all my time spent obsessing over the templates.

If I hadn't been under a time-crunch, I would have wiped off the designs, gone out and bought a different kind of pen, then re-done them, but at this point, it was day 3 of only 4 days I could work on these, and I hadn't even had the chance to fire once. I had to just take extra time and be super careful.

Even though you can see I have a design on the side of the pig (that wraps all the way around), I only had a silhouette that I was happy with. I didn't have any plan of how/what to fill them in. At least with the top design I had a 75% clue what I was going to do... but the lustres had to go on first, and I was swiftly running out of time.

Here's the red-resisted Sleepy Pig, and this is my first major error with this project. I should have reversed the areas that I red-resisted. By the way, do you have a better idea now why I didn't want there to be 'pig anus' for the wrap-around designs? That's actually the main reason I did do a wrap-around rather than have a focus point like in some of the discarded sketched designs.

Oh, and so you can appreciate the detail level... those thin white lines in the clouds are about 1/8" wide.

Piggy banks stage 2: templates

The Lotus pig design came together first because of this image:

I knew it was 'too busy' to attempt (especially since the lotus in this book is about 12" in diameter, and on the pig, I had about 5", max. But I liked this so much, I finally stopped digging my heels in and did the math for a 10-point lotus instead of an 8-point one.

Here's the difference: To get an 8-point design, all you need to do is fold a piece of paper in half once, twice, three times, and there you have it. It creates eight evenly spaced straight lines.

To make a 10-point design, first I found my centre and laid down concentric circles. Then I quartered the paper and inked out the first 2 lines. Then, with a ruler that is so bendable I can wrap it around a twoonie (for non-Canadians, this is our $2 coin), and measured, in millimetres, the length of each arc between the 4 quartered points along the outermost circle, the middle circle, and the inner-most circle. Then I broke each measurement into five. Since this entire template is only about 5", all of the measurements were partial millimetres. Then I marked down each division point (yes, I did this all the way around the entire design, not just on half so I could make sure it was precise as possible) and drew in each line.

So, my first template has 20 sections marked out.

After I had the initial template, I made a smaller template of each individual large petal, and the tiny sub petal, laid them out, and drew them on.

By this time, I was on my 6th template as I had to discard several along the way.

Finally I ended up with:

I taped down the centre and four points, then carefully outlined each petal. Because the paper is flat, and the pig was round, it's difficult to make sure everything remains even because when you bend the paper down, the surface to draw on is smaller than the template. To make sure I didn't end up with lopsidedly spaced petals, I held down three petals at a time and drew from each point down towards the centre. Due to spacing, the sub-petals ended up nearly non-existent.

Here's the final inked-on design for the top of the Lotus Pig. My first big mistake of this project: the Micron pens rub off easily, so further work was very time-consuming/finicky.



Here's the main inspirational image for the top design of the Sleepy Pig. I took in inner blue design and modified it. The main reason I ended up choosing something along this line is because it was 8 sided, which is lucky, and it left a good blank centre where I could later include Chinese characters.

My first start of the template. Making the final template only took about an hour, compared to the 3 hours it took to make the template for the Lotus Pig.

Second stage of the template.

The longest part of making this template was squaring off every bit of the 'T' shape. If you click on the picture to see it bigger, you'll see what I mean. Again, remember I'm working off a template that is less than 5" in diameter. Each line in the 'T' shapes are just a little over 1/4" thick. Squaring off those was... straining on the eyes, and on my problematic right hand/arm.

And here's the design inked on. To extend the corner lines, I actually laid down strips of thin tape so I could make 100% sure the lines would be a consistent width.

See how the coin slot isn't centred? Grrrr... still bothers me... It actually is slightly angled to the right, as well as being too far forward. Made it very difficult to put this design on straight.

Piggy banks stage 1, roughing out the designs

When I started out making these gifts, I had no previous plan or even a rough visual in mind.

All I knew was the personality/preferences of the two mothers-to-be, and the gender of one baby.

There were two major design 'problems' to work with:

1) The shape of the pig is in no way symmetrical. Even the location of the coin slot isn't centred in any meaningful position. Because of this, there were a lot of things I wanted to do that seemed great in theory, but just didn't look good when you actually laid it out on the piece.

2) Almost any design on the back of the pig... ended up looking comically like a piggy anus. While this was... amusing, it also resulted in discarding many ideas.


I spent a full two days looking through books and roughing out sketches (using a black micron pen) on the surface of the porcelain pigs before I finally decided on a lotus design for the girl baby (hereafter known as Lotus Pig), and a gender-neutral Chinese influenced design for the baby I didn't know the gender of (hereafter known as Sleepy Pig).

I didn't take many pictures because most of the designs were wiped clean before they looked even remotely usable.

You can see I was playing with both pig designs in this, one sleepy eye and one cute/feminine eye, and I was toying around with more of an Arabesque look on the top, and a sharper design on the bottom.

One thing I also played around with was either creating a band-like design that wrapped around the whole piece (which I ended up with), or more of a point of interest design, like this, which is more traditional for European porcelain painting.

The tops of this one was where I started meandering from Arabic into Chinese influences, and decided it worked better overall, even if this particular design was scrapped.

The Lotus Pig was the one that came together first, and in the initial design stage proved more difficult than the Sleepy Pig, but Sleepy Pig ended up more problematic in other ways. You can see I was already partially roughing out a template at this stage, but you'll notice I still had a 8-point lotus instead of the 10-point lotus which was the final design. The 8-point just really didn't look as good, but I was hesitant to 'do the math' required to make a 10-point lotus.

Here was the semi-final roughed-out Lotus Pig design just before I started making templates. I really liked the cute eyes.