Saturday 20 April 2013

A Play Day

As you know Jan and I have been going to evening classes with Hilary Bowen to play with metal clay. Well yesterday we spent a whole day with Hilary, a couple of the other ladies from class and Carol Douglas, another superb clay worker.  

Hilary has the most amazing studio space to work in.

Some of Carols work.


We were using bronze and copper.  I haven't used the copper yet and it's surprising how different they all are.  Silver is very soft and malleable almost to the point of being annoyingly sticky if you're not careful.  Bronze is in the middle but quite sandy in comparison and copper is like blu tac, very springy and hard to imprint fine detail.  You also end up with black hands from the oxidising.

My two efforts of the day are below.  The bronze on the left was trying a very, very thin roll out and draping technique which I quite liked.  The copper was just imprinted into a texture mat and domed.  The bronze was fired in the kiln and the copper by torch.

I was really pleased with the amount of information I picked up especially about kiln use and firing.  We did fire this a different way to how I have used mine before.  I will have to experiment!   Plenty to try and absorb now.

Have a wonderful weekend whatever you're doing.


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