Adding details to ceramic boxes

Butterfly Box

Butterfly Box

My in-laws have been in town since last weekend and despite the distraction, I’ve managed to make and finish work for the Colorado Potters Guild Show opening at the end of the month.  These boxes are still green – or unfired – and will be bisque fired some time early next week.  I don’t have as much work as I would have liked, but I am happy with what I have made.  The sides of these boxes have intentionally been left with no decoration because I’ll be adding laser toner decals after I have glazed the boxes.  BTW, the butterfly sprig and knob (above) and the heart knob (below) were made using a chocolate mold.

Heart Box

Heart Box

I have a few larger boxes, this one included.  “Large” is a fairly subjective statement, however, since this only measures 4″ across and tall.  I think this one could go many different directions in regards to decal motifs – from the sanguine to more contemporary (I immediately saw tattoo images with the hearts).

Lavender Butterfly Box

Lavender Butterfly Box

For this box, I used underglaze for color and will add decals over the butterflies [one on each side] as an experiment.  You may remember my failed attempt several weeks ago when I over fired a bisque load.

Tall Flower Box

Tall Flower Box

Finally, this tall box isn’t terribly practical, but it would be sweet to store wedding rings next to a night stand or sink or as a gift box to present someone with a special gift.  The flowers were made from lino-cuts – which I desperately need to expand for more variety!  I still have other boxes in varying degrees of being finished, but haven’t photographed them yet.  My hand building phase is coming to an end right now, which means it’s time to throw a few things in preparation for the show.  I’ve learned that throwing is a much faster process than hand building – but enjoy doing both.

Meanwhile, I reverted to my old Word Press theme while I figure out how to use The Gimp instead of Photoshop to manipulate the images in my file folders.  While it’s fairly similar to Photoshop and many of the tools are recognizable, it hasn’t been an intuitive switch for me so I picked up a book called Beginning Gimp by Akkanna Peck yesterday.  I was getting frustrating trying to use my old way of working and am determined to make Ubuntu and free open source software work for me.   In fact, yesterday I was in Best Buy and I took another look at new cell phones, lap tops – including the MacBook Pro, and really restrained myself from making any hasty buying decisions.

That’s it for today,

~Cynthia

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16 comments

  • cindy shake

    April 17, 2009 at 2:14 pm // Reply

    Your Boxes are so lovely and when you use the decals it’s icing on the cake ;o) I have only been handbuilding and understand what you mean about being a much slower process… as far as handbuilding for production that may be an oxymoron -ha!

    • Cynthia

      April 18, 2009 at 8:55 am // Reply

      Oxymoron indeed! :D I think that’s why I’m going to be delving into molds for my boxes after the sale is over…. I have been reclaiming clay – in fact I just realized how much darn clay that I have in my coffers and am going to do a little throwing here the next few days to pick up the slack. I’m not allowing myself to buy any new clay until I’ve used all my reclaim!!!

      • cindy shake

        April 18, 2009 at 3:21 pm // Reply

        …now that I’ve been back into clay for a few months now, I completely understand what you mean by how the clay collects. I looked under the Slab Roller Table and counted way too many wadded up, mysterious plastic bags filled with a hunks of left over clay! I should start looking into reclaiming -yikes, something else to add to my clay to-do list -ha!

  • jim

    April 18, 2009 at 7:27 am // Reply

    looking forward to the finished boxes… i’m hearing a lot about gimp but can’t see migrating from photoshop… what’s the advantage?

    • Cynthia

      April 18, 2009 at 8:50 am // Reply

      I do have Photoshop CS2 (along with the whole creative suite), but it’s a windows version and now that I’m using a Ubuntu (linux OS) it’s not quite like it used to be. I managed to get Photoshop working [sort of] with the use of WINE, software that runs windows based programs on Linux – but it has limited functionality. GIMP is a free open source image/graphic program like photoshop that can run on any OS and is supposedly just as powerful as Photoshop. I’m so used to using Photoshop (have been using it for the past 5 years now) that using GIMP now is a bit like starting over, but only more frustrating. The tools are the same, but they’re not in the same place nor necessarily called the same thing, short cuts are different and there are just enough differences (probably legal requirement) so that it’s not quite as intuitive for me to quickly do stuff.

      I can easily edit photographs, but spent a good hour the other day trying to figure out how to enlarge text. I also installed Inkscape, a vector graphics program like Illustrator, but haven’t used it yet. I wasn’t as fluent in Illustrator as Photoshop, so that won’t be quite the same problem for me using this program. Of course being a tech geek wannabe, Blender (an animation program) looks cool too.

      So, to answer your original question, GIMP is a great free alternative to Photoshop for those of us who either can’t afford to buy the software or who are running a non windows or mac OS. I suppose that’s part of the limitation of using a linux os – it’s free, but it costs time to figure out how to do stuff if migrating from a different platform. ;)

    • Cynthia

      April 18, 2009 at 8:39 am // Reply

      Thanks Jean – it’s a new Duncan underglaze that I purchased for my kid’s class – I have pretty good success firing the underglazes higher though too.

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