William Tries Things

Worked on a few more hand-built vessels yesterday in class 🙂 Really loving how these are turning out!

I've just released a few new pieces of pottery, and I always like to show some behind-the-scenes photos of the making of new pieces when I release them. So, here are a few in-progress shots of the new items I released today.

I've just released some new pottery! I showed these pieces during some of our Allegory Gallery lives the past week, and now they are available in our online store. I also have them, this weekend, at our shop in Johnstown.

Thank you all for your support of my art. Lately, I've found myself moving away from the wheel and more into hand-built items. I love the fact that they have a grittiness about them. They aren't perfect…I'm not tempted to make them perfect. They do what I want to a point, but the clay also has its own idea of where it wants to be and how it wants to be. I'm still making some items on the wheel, and I have more in the works, but I think these hand-built types of vessels is where I'm heading for a little while.

I've also been really into dots and pattern-making lately. There's something calming and centering about taking a blank vessel and starting by putting one dot down…and then seeing where that takes me. It's time-consuming. It's harder than just adding some glaze and calling it done. It's also incredibly difficult to want to add any glaze over top of them later for fear of covering them up too much. But, right now, it's making me happy. I hope these make you happy, too.

I've just gotten back some of my latest piece from the kiln, and I love how they came out! If you see any that you like, they are now available on our Allegory Gallery online store :-) Check out all of my items there today :-)

To those who've helped me over the past few days by purchasing some of my pieces, I want to say a huge THANK YOU! I've used some of that money to grab some underglazes for what will be my home studio. I've realized that I'm spending a lot of my paid class time doing things that I could be working on from home in the evenings. So, we're trying to get a small home basement studio going for me. Now that I've been working on what process seems to work best for me, I found that having some of these could be really useful. And these, in addition to the wonderful gifts I got during my birthday this year, will really help me be able to do that—and allow me to use my class time to learn new things.

Andrew and I really believe in investing back into our business and what we do. That means that sometimes we have the same couch for 21 years (if you know, you know) and don't buy a lot of personal things, but it also means that we are able to continue doing what we love in our work. So, thank you again for allow me me to do this

I can't believe that it's been exactly two months from the start of these dishes until I've gotten my first batch of them back. Of course, our class kiln died a few times in between there, so there's that!

I tried a new process for working on these so that I could use different glazes and more colors than I was using before on my little dishes, and also work on them in a different way that may make more sense for the flow of creation. I love how they came out, and I already have a new set of them in progress right now. Between the trials that I've done with these and some of my other pieces, it seems that I'll be up to a lot of colors that I'll have access to while still keeping the details of my mark-making.

The evolution of a piece.

I thought it would be fun to show you some of the step-by-steps that went into my latest bowl. I was going to add this one to the online store, but someone requested to purchase it directly from our Allegory Gallery live yesterday, so it's no longer available. I learned a lot from doing this one, though, and I can't wait to see where that takes me!

What I didn't show about my new pieces on my last post is that I've also started decorating the bottoms a little bit. While these can't be glossy, it's been fun playing the the glazes to give the other sizes a little bit of something extra :-)