Dry ink

What would dry ink be?  Pigment?  This post is about screen printing using ceramic underglaze powders, through a screen - in this case a Riso screen 70# instead of a traditional silkscreen.  It is almost as messy as using wet materials PLUS you MUST wear a dust mask.  I normally mix dry underglaze or oxides with a printing gel medium into paste of syrupy consistency and squeegee it through the screen in the usual way.  Some people like to use honey as their medium but that attracts ants in my studio.  Steve Allen in San Franscisco screens dry materials sometimes on his incredible sculptural forms, something he demo'd at CAAWA's Potober in Perth in 2010.  What I like is the blendability factor that using dry materials allows.  You can use this method when screening directly onto a soft leather hard form (probably using the mesh unframed) or screening onto a slab of soft clay about to be draped over a mould.  All you need is a suitable Riso Screen (thermal printer screen), some underglaze powder and a bristle brush - the cheap oil painting kind.  I add a small amount of a fritt like 3124 to ensure it the colour bonds to the surface in the bisque firing or it could get messy, especially if you are planning on glazing the work. I find the powder colours by Walker Ceramics are especially bright and glowing.  Here we have the lightweight A4 sized Riso screen just lifted from leather hard clay tile below.  I think the screen looks prettier than the tile - but you get the idea.  I had just been showing students at Rockingham TAFE ceramics department how to do this.  My Thermal Printer is from Nehoc Australia, I use it for printing on paper, ceramics and textiles, infinitely useful - even  for T-shirts to order for my three teen sons. Every school should have a Nehoc Thermal Printer.   In Perth, Western Australia we can just pop into a Jacksons art store and ask for a screen to be made from our hi resolution black and white art.
Hey do you want to know more about what potters are getting up to look at Mud Colony where some chummy potters share their recent blog postings regularly.

Progress

Easter is over and on to another term.  I am enjoying the kickback time with our boys who have a few extra days at home but it plays havoc with my work habits.  This week I start teaching a class at Challenger TAFE in Rockingham, Print on Clay stuff, over three Thursdays.  I will try to grab some snaps of the progress there.

For the Introduction to Throwing class last term at CIT we spent the last class glazing and the students took to it like a duck to water.  They were the perfect students. I explained why not to double dip pots from one bucket of glaze to another  - to avoid contamination of the glazes and they were hyper vigilant about it.  Now their work is ready to be collected, and I hope they will be thrilled. Here they are signing their work before putting them in for bisque firing,.

Trying stuff out - and multitasking, kinda.

Carving up rubber blocks and trying out some Mishima are among the things I've been doing this week. I admit to loving watching Downton Abbey on my huuuge iMac while carving SpeedyCut rubber blocks with which to print on clay later on. My failing eyes were the excuse for buying the biggest computer screen in the shop. I forgot my iPod in the studio but was serenaded by Johnny Cash on CD while I inlaid underglaze on some simple platters. Is there anybody as cool as JC? Why do I fall back on flower, leaf, bird motifs so often? Because I enjoy them I guess.

In print

The current edition of The Journal of Australian Ceramics is fat and heavy in the way an expensive copy of Vogue would be, but far more use to the likes of us!  It is full of articles on potters and pottery and as upbeat as could possibly be.  Someone in twenty years time will flick through it and think what a great bunch of artists were in the field in Australia in 2012.  It is funny, I wasn't so upbeat about my own birthday of same age a few months ago - but then, I didn't know that I would be featured in the JAC 50th anniversary issue on pages 68-72 -(breaks into HUUUUGE grin ;>D).  The photo of myself I provided is 'the pits' - I should have planned that better but it was a scorcher and nobody felt good that day.  It was fun to see my lovely son's name credited on the photo all the same.  It would not be appropriate or legal, I think, to scan and post the article here.  I hope you can go out and buy this beautiful and bounteous issue of what is an excellent publication.  The educational bodies here may refuse to acknowledge the demand for continuing to teach the craft - they just need to see this issue of The Journal of Australian Ceramics to see how wrong this view is.  We will thrive and share the enthusiasm and knowledge - no matter how many colleges close down their ceramics departments.

Gone now to go Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee  

Ya gotta have friends ....

Weeks and weeks and weeks of careful drying.

It's a song! I can hear Bette Midler singing it in my head as soon as I think those words.  Once, walking my sons to school, we were talking about juggling 'friends', I was saying 'I have lots of friends', then muttered 'more than I can keep up with'.  A woman passing us by smiled and said 'Lucky you!'  It is true I have stacks of pals and they are all lovely!  One is advising me with regard to getting my website up and running.  Hil has a career's worth of marketing wisdom under her belt but especially - web related.  She spotted that I rarely discuss my own work here. It's true, but I have been busy making and storing stuff as it takes so long to dry out slowly (and struggling with a virus but no whining here).  I mean, would you like to be watching clay dry here?  It is slower than paint!  Hence I blog about others.  I am good at sharing info and documenting my own work and trials but now, I resolve to be a bit more organised with my blogging, maybe introduce some more structure to it and to try to

a) blog more often

b) account for my own activity and

c) maybe talk a little more about the methods and materials I have tried and favour for PRINT on CLAY.  

SOME OF MY UNDERGLAZE TESTS

Just now, I am knee deep in Diana Fayt's the Clayer Surfacing e-Course and honestly - if you want to know what I am learning there, then I will be a meany and say, sign up for it yourself next time it is offered, you will not be disappointed.  I will post images of the work that develops from the e-course though, but, as always in my entire educational career, I am behind with my work.

I have been teaching Sgraffito and Paper Resist techniques in a high school lately, and learning more of Sgraffito and Mishima (colour inlay) via Diana.  I have made some platters ready to do the Mashima - but they were too soft to work on yesterday, so I got some test tiles sorted using the new underglaze colours I bought.  I learnt to be a bit of a neat freak about test tiles from Janet deBoos, her terra sig tests were exemplary.  Test, test and test some more is the potter's motto.  Here, three depths of brushstrokes of underglazes to be tested with and without glaze, and on two clays and temperature ranges.