This is what I want to find in my stocking on Christmas morning: raku pottery garden markers from Sweet Paisley. Choose from a selection of herb names or request your own, all for $4.
I grow basil, mint, chives and oregano. (Hint, hint. )
This time of year, the fall wildflowers fill our roadside ditches and paint vacant lots with yellow (beggarticks and narrow-leaf sunflowers), red (turkish lanterns), orange (native lantana) and purple (trillium and mist flowers). Stubborn and opportunistic, they don’t need a gardener’s help. All they require is a patch of dirt underneath, the bright autumn sun above, and the blessing of occasional rain.
We’ve had a lot of rain lately. The ground is saturated, clouds of mosquitos are swarming, and tiny mushrooms are popping up throughout the neighborhood. We woke this morning to the latest in a long, gray string of gloomy skies — but suddenly, around midday, the clouds parted and the sun came out. I was relieved that we would not be forced to use our stack of soon-to-be-chicken-coop lumber to build a boat, after all. And I was reminded of this watercolor, painted years ago when my children were small. Here are some close-ups of the cheerful critters:
Hooray! All the tiles survived the rigors of raku firing and now the panel is ready to be permanently affixed to its backing.
My favorite part of this project: carving the wing feathers.
I love the way botanical subjects look in raku. It’s such a great technique for subjects drawn from nature — and sometimes you get a nice little gift from the fire: an unexpected flash of pure copper, pulled from the glaze during the oxygen-starved reduction stage. I bury the hot tiles under mounds of fresh wood shavings, where they smolder for a minute or two before being quenched in a cool water bath. I think the copper that appeared in the background sets off the canna leaf quite nicely!
This 44×22 panel will be auctioned off tomorrow night at Phantasy for the Arts, a fundraising event for the Fairhope Educational Enrichment Foundation.
…and now begins 5 or 6 days of slow, careful drying. After the moisture has evaporated from the clay, the panel will be an inch shorter and the tiles will be ready for their first firing to 1825 degrees.
Now the lower half of the raku tile panel has been carved. These are orange canna lilies, sketched right outside the studio window. (I love those big, curving leaves.) The snowy egret appears in the top half of the design… you’ll have to come back tomorrow to see him. The entire panel will be carved and ready to begin a slow drying process tomorrow evening.
This 44-inch panel, glazed and raku fired, will be auctioned Oct. 26 at Phantasy of the Arts, an annual fundraiser for the wonderful Fairhope Educational Enrichment Foundation. The foundation has awarded more than $247,000 in classroom grants so far. Need more information about this event? Click HERE.
I’m in the preliminary stages of a large (44 inch tall) carved raku tile panel, an image of an egret, canna lilies and palmetto. The design is a combination of botanical and bird studies from my nature sketchbook — I like to draw my subjects first, to get to know their angles and curves better before carving them into clay.
The raku tiles are individually rolled out on a slab roller, compressed energetically with a wooden rib, then trimmed to size with a needle tool. I work slowly and carefully, with the goal of having all the edges match up as nearly perfectly as I can make them. Then I’m ready to draw the basic design in the tile surfaces, which I do freehand with my needle tool. Here’s a section of a canna lily:
Finally, when the whole design has been drawn, I will cover the panel lightly and let it rest overnight. By tomorrow afternoon, when the tiles have lost their stickiness, they’ll be just right for carving the relief into the clay surface. See you tomorrow!
…is that my tiles dry out very quickly. Even though the autumn equinox is less than two weeks away, the thermometer still hovers around 90 degrees each afternoon. I can open the studio windows a little and let the warm breeze play across the surface of freshly-made raku tiles, knowing that in just a few days they’ll all be ready for the bisque kiln.
My studio assistant, Atticus, supervises the tile-drying process in between his frequent naps:
I’m mulling over an idea for some raku horses, and I always think better with a sketchbook and a Sharpie. I’ve loved drawing horses for as long as I can remember. In the third grade, I carved galloping horses into the desks of my classmates with a ball-point pen… the kids loved them, but my teacher wasn’t as impressed. She sentenced me to an entire year of refinishing the desks during recess, with the assistance of a frail boy who had to stay indoors because he was recovering from a head injury. We had fun sanding and sealing the desks, one by one, while all the other students had to run laps and do jumping-jacks out on the athletic field. Sometimes crime DOES pay.
