Seminar with Patrizia Arvieri

Okay, this post has been... six days in the making, so it may feel a little disjointed and there might be a lot of spelling mistakes because:

Long-story-short, ribs went out again. I had four chiro appointments in two days, plus my usual rounds of physio/massage/acupuncture appointments...

And in the end, nothing would settle down, so it was time for a few days of ice, lying still, and some codeine-heavy anti-spasm muscle relaxants. Fun, fun, fun. I'm still kinda loopy, hence the warning about spelling/wording mistakes/etc.


So, the seminar... I was excited about this for months. My grandmother always gives money for birthdays/Christmas (one of the perks of being 1 of only 2 grandchildren), and I always hang onto it until I can buy something nice/special... so it doesn't just disappear into grocery bills, gas, etc.

Since seminars are quite expensive, and since my arm/etc was in poor shape, I didn't sign up for any workshops at the convention, and I only signed up for the one seminar (but there was another one I would have liked to have taken...)

...which ended up being good because... essentially, I paid a lot of money to 'watch'.

I was able to do a bit of the prep stuff, but NO painting. It was very frustrating, both because I had been so excited and because I couldn't even control my arm enough to freaking load paint on it properly... it shook so badly that it globbed onto the bristles.

So I felt like a total faker/loser.

But I am still REALLY glad I took the seminar.

In seminars, everyone paints the same piece the same way. It's about learning specific techniques, and that (of course) works best when everyone is doing the same piece.

Here's a not very good picture of the piece (I pulled it off the web).

Just like Patrizia's method of painting gold on a black background is very unique (and normally very difficult), the main technique we were learning was painting regular paint on top of gold.

YEAH... again, her work is so different and amazing because it's like she turns the 'normal' rules around. Since gold is so expensive, usually you put it on last.


Just to put this out there for those who don't know, since these are seminar pieces, a student would never claim them as 'their' work or sell them as their work because the teacher paints on your piece to show you how to do it correctly.


So, here are the basic steps...

 Tracing paper... the design is drawn on with a  black micron pen. THEN, you use a special porcelain pencil, and draw on the backside. In my case, since I'm disobedient, I used a Staedtler 6B pencil, and it worked just fine... BUT, you can't use just any kind of pencil, because lots of them won't fire off in the kiln, and then you're left with grey smudges mixed in - permanently - with your paint.

Then you tape the tracing paper (right side up) onto the porcelain and use this funny stylus tool (sorry, no pic of it) that is like a bent pin with a tiny ball at the end to draw over the lines. This will transfer a thin pencil line onto the porcelain (see next picture).

 Then  comes the joy of red resist. That wasn't sarcastic... I actually really like using red resist because it allows you to work with very complex designs.

The only part that wasn't fun was, since I HAD to use my poor right hand to draw with the pencil, and then use the stylus tool to transfer the pencil to the porcelain, my right arm was shaking so bad I couldn't even hold the brush.

So... red resist all done with my left hand... which didn't get me the clean lines I would have wanted, and even though it took about twice as long as it would have, I did get better at it.

 So, here's my plate with the red resist on.

Oh, you'll notice there's different shaped plates. Mine is this square one. Yumiko used a different square one, but the other people in the seminar all used circular plates. So you'll see different shapes as I took pictures not just of mine (since I couldn't paint, mine was never finished).

 Now, here's the first layer of gold (yes, it goes on black since it's mixed with so many toxic things to keep it in a liquid state). I could do this as well, since you basically just paint it on within the red resisted areas (fine to do left handed), and then blot it carefully with a sponge (also okay to do left handed). I took this photo at this weird angle so I could see the amount of light on the gold... because when you're working with it this way, the texture has to be really consistent so you know if there's full coverage, and to make sure there aren't bubbles.

 Then, when the gold has dried, you pull off the red resist.

 ...and you fire it.

Unfortunately, there was a mishap with the gold... there are different kinds of gold.  Fluxed, which has (obviously) flux in it, and unfluxed. Flux makes gold, or paint, stick into the glaze... if you are painting gold on top of paint (like you normally do), you often use unfluxed because the paint you're painting the gold on already has flux in it...

BUT, we accidentally used unfluxed gold... so it actually wiped off when we tried to burnish it.

We lost an entire day because everything had to be redone, and we did some things out of order to try to make up the lost time...

 Then you do a second coat of red resist and gold.

It's always a good idea to take a picture of the red resist BEFORE you put on the gold or other paint because, like this section with the tiny separate piece, once you paint over top, it's easy to forget that little bit is on there, and if you forget to take it off and put it in the kiln... it makes a big mess that cannot be fixed.

Okay, so burnishing... this is what the gold looks like immediately out of the kiln. Dull, eh? And not really pretty? That's 'cause it hasn't been burnished yet. Some gold you don't have to burnish, depends on what kind of look you want.

Compare:

The gold in this picture is... half burnished. See how the light catches it? See all the little lines in it and cloudy verses bright gold?

OKAY, in the next few pictures, IGNORE when you see unfired gold (the black stuff) on the bamboo. Since we lost that day because of the gold mix-up, some of the seminar students started working on the frogs before putting on a second coat of gold, and did that later... but really, they're supposed to be on first... this was just so everyone could see/learn in the allotted time, and since the teacher was flying back to Italy, it's not like there was a way to extend by a day, or even by a few hours.

 So, there were three different stages of painting on top of the gold. For each firing, about 25% of the paint colour gets absorbed into the gold and disappears, so you have to paint the colours on darker than you actually want the end result to be.

This is what the first layer of colour for the frog looks like...

 And here you can see first layer (bottom half of the frog) and the beginning of the second layer (top of the frog). Depending on the medium (the liquid you mix with the dry/powdered paint), the paint can dry, or it will never dry. Patrizia uses a closed-medium, which means the paint will dry and you can paint over it before you fire. Open or closed medium is determined by the type of oil you mix into the paint.

 Here's someone else's second-layer frog with the first layer of bamboo painting on.

 Here's the red resisted, and painted (before being fired) sky/background splatter

And here's the first layer of the paint brushes...

This is the one that was nearly finished... you can see the colour on the paint brushes hasn't been done yet.

I really encourage you to click on the photo and look at the details.

Unfortunately, that was the last picture I took... BUT, I watched closely, and several students took videos with their iPads/phones, and someone compiled them all onto a flash drive for everyone to have a copy, which was above-and-beyond nice...

Learning from Patrizia was amazing. Even though, when everyone heard I wasn't actually able to paint, they all said, aww what a waste of (time/money/etc), it was still an absolutely invaluable experience for me.

I loved it, and I would love to take another seminar with her in the future.

Piggy banks stage 7: more gold, and enamel

So, my first friend had given birth to the baby girl, and the second was due any day when I finally made it back to my painting mentor's house the second week of November. I had 2 days before she left town for a month, and I had to re-do the gold work... and normally you want to do two coats of gold, but I was pretty sure I was going to run out of time.

So, with my wrecked right arm, I discarded the pen I had used, opened a fresh bottle of Liquid Bright Gold, and got to work. This brand of Liquid Bright went on red instead of yellow (another brand goes on green), which, unfortunately, was pretty hard to use on top of a red micron pen... Again, if it's too lightly applied, it doesn't turn out gold.

Fortunately, the end result was pretty good. I managed to get all the gold on in one day, and in the late afternoon, fired them. In the morning, I mixed up white enamel, (using it for the first time ever!!!) applied it, and managed to fire them before I had to leave in the afternoon.

They were actually still hot... had to use oven mitts to get them out of the kiln and then wrap them up in my spare clothes so they didn't cool down too quickly.

Other than the gold turning out not as dark as I wanted (especially on the Chinese characters), I'm pretty pleased with the way they turned out.

Here's the end result of the Lotus Pig:

 In this lighting you can just see the enamel catching the light differently... there is a dot on every bubble, on the seeds (on top), and in the centres of the lotuses on the sides.

Now here's the final Sleepy Pig which, coincidentally, ended up being a boy, and his name begins with 'T' so that was a total happy coincidence:

 You can't see them very well, but the characters in the middle of each 'T' shape are the "four blessings" (si fu 四福) are happiness (xi 喜), prosperity (lu 禄), longevity (shou 寿), and good luck (good fortune) (fu 福).

Because the parents of this baby are Christian, the characters at the bottom are:

Blessed:

And the ones on the top are:

Faith: 

Happiness: 

Joy: 

Peace: 

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.