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.