Today's work

Today I went in to work on the Pip hobo jug a little more and prep for tomorrow's tile work.

Tile stuff: First I rolled a half-inch-thick slab (Waterworks has two slab rollers!), smoothed the surface with a metal rib to get rid of the canvas texture, and used a template I'd cut out at home that's about 4 3/4" by 7" to cut out the tile (the original comics are 4x6, but the clay will shrink probably about 10% so it will probably be fairly close to original size in the end). Once that was cleaned up, I let it sit out while I was working, and it's sitting in the damp box now and hopefully will be close to leather hard by tomorrow so I can work on it. It may be just a clay rectangle now, but tomorrow, it will look like this! ... Well, actually, I will be happy if I just get the background skyline done. That'll be dug in, and then the trees and the cats will be built up.

That done, I got Pip out to see what could be done about giving him arms. This is what I got:



Pretty cute, no? I'll have to clean it up a bit once it's more dry, but it's pretty much done.

I had some clay that was a little dried out from rolling the slab earlier that I wanted to use up (it'd be too dry for another time), so I cranked out one of these:



A wonky-eyed owl. I started making little coil owls years ago. I must have made about 60 by now. I've got wads at home, sold others. My mom's commissioned me to make her some because she gives them as gifts for graduations with quotes about wisdom.

I got the idea for owls out of a kids project book for clay. Theirs were made out of pinch bowls, but I made mine out of coils and I've got all sorts of feather-ish stamps made for them. Just take a blade to a pencil eraser! You can carve anything you can carve on a tiny, round surface.