My very rudimentary clay monotype
In preparation for a kid’s art workshop that I’m going to be teaching at the Art Student’s League this coming summer, I decided to attempt making a clay and underglaze monotype outlined in Paul Wandless’ book, Image Transfer on Clay, pg.72. I had limited success, but, to be honest, I didn’t really follow his instructions to a “T”. I didn’t have time to make any slip to transfer my drawing, so I tried using a very wet slab. The results? Not all the image transferred - so I filled in the blanks by directly painting the underglaze onto the printed slab. I will try again next time using either a plaster slab, or a slip applique as outlined in his book. I do think, that by taking the short cut and seeing the results, I learned a lot - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. You just never know until you try.Meanwhile, I’m not impressed with my image and am going to add some interest to the piece after it’s bisqued. Maybe I’ll stamp or screen print more onto the background - I’m going to continue to think about it.

Image Transfer on Clay
This is an awesome book - one I highly recommend if you are interested in combining printmaking techniques and ceramics. Paul’s book has great step by step instructions along with recipes and supplier information. Another good book on the same topic is Ceramics and Print by Paul Scott.
I used the students from my after school kid’s clay class as my guinea pigs for the monotype experiment. After spending an hour glazing their projects from last week, I realized that a 2 hour class wasn’t long enough to do this project. I made an executive decision to scrap clay monotypes and had them draw and paint their designs directly onto their slabs.I have exciting news too - my class is overflowing and now have 13 kids in my Monday class and 18 in my Tuesday class. After trying to teach the class by myself last week and practically re-enacting a scene from Lord of the Flies (where I’m afraid the kids were close to tying me up), I decided I needed help. I just hired a high school student who is taking advanced ceramic classes to help me out. Yesterday was her first day and she’s perfect!

That’s all for today,

~Cynthia

Tags: clay monotype, image transfer on clay, kid's clay classes in Denver, Paul Andrew Wandless

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Ceramic Techniques, Kid's Clay Projects.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.