Bluetiful

When I arrived at the AKI yesterday, things looked remarkably like they had looked the week before. The room with the stoves was still closed, but my painted work from last week, which Erik would powder-glaze, was still exactly where I'd put it, and it looked a lot like it had when I put it there.

Hmm...

Erik was ill, was the logical explanation given to me moments later. And he had been so for three days now. This was of course not what I was expecting, as I had hoped to talk to him this week, to discuss what to do in the next weeks. But that had to wait, and I had to wait. But I was at the AKI, so what better to do while waiting than letting out some creativity?

I decided to continue with the casting slib, but try with different pigments, and see how I could incorporate colour into the little bowls that I had made before. Armed with a mixer and a gas-mask, I got to work.

(Yes this is apparently THE way to mix pigments into casting slib)

I tried to make three tints of blue, but looking at the slib mixture, one of the blues looked green, and the other red. I hope they will all turn out blue-ish though. I picked blue because that is the colour I see most through the microscope, and the colour effects of the nucleus are often quite surprisingly beautiful. I tried to combine the different colours in the bowl-shaped molds.

(Sorry about the compiled images, but Blogger was being very annoying with their limited amount of picture placement options..)

What I was trying to do, was to mix the colours more and more, by pouring them into a mold, letting it dry, pouring the remainder out into a cup, and pouring this back into a new mold. This gave increasingly mixed colours, as you can see above, where the first picture is the first time I used the slibs, and the bottom row is the second usage. I did not do this with all mixed slibs though, because I also tried to pour the mixed clay onto the gypsum plate I talked about earlier.

(This makes me feel a little bit as if I am looking at Jupiter)

I tried this three times over, making about two or three new bowls, and one pouring each round. And afterwards I tried to mount the bowls together in such a way that their edges align (last time I mounted them such that the bottoms align). This turned out to be a bit more difficult than I had expected, because when the bowls lie upside-down, it is very difficult to press the connecting parts together. I was so taken by this task that I forgot to take pictures of the bowls, so Ill show you how they turned out next week. I will spoil to you that the first ones looked magnificent on the inside, but plain on the outside, and that this slowly turned around when the slib was used more often. I hope this keeps you curious.

What also managed to capture my attention was that finally part of my work from last week could be taken out of the oven! The mat glazing had turned out like a milky-white layer when it was applied abundantly, and gave more colour but no shine when applied in normal amounts. The shine glazing was as expected, shiny, but less transparant then I had hoped. In some cases it was even hard to distinguish between shine and mat glazing, but that is probably mostly due to my lack of experience. What surprised me most was the craquelure glazing, which had not cracked, probably because my pieces of art were too small to build up enough tension, or because the oven had not reached top temperature for the craquelure to crack, but it had formed a lot of bubbles. This, though, was not what surprised me so much. What did was the colour explosion that was taking place under the glazing. Red had become bright red (instead of the pale pink it was under the other glazings) and black was truly pitch black. This wild bubbly -or in some cases chipped- look, and the bright colours made this glazing my instant favorite.

(The middle red blood cell makes me think of a doughnut)

This last image is one of the unglazed ones next to one that is shine-glazed, because I almost had forgotten how pale they looked when they came out of the oven the first time.

So for next week, I hope Erik is back by then, so we can discuss how to continue, next to that I hope I can experiment a little more with glazing next week. Additionally, I hope I can finally see the other half of my work from last week, and I am curious to see if the blue tints that now looked green and red will stay that way or -hopefully- not.