Today’s challenge was to take an everyday object and use it as the subject. I chose my favourite coffee cup – white porcelain. I thought it would be a tricky thing to represent with black powder on white glass, and so was worth a try. Of course, everything is tricky, but I wanted to have a go at reflections/shinyness.
I drew the cup in outline on sifted powder first. I liked this, but made myself add several thin siftings of powder to try to get the details of the highlights and contours. I fiddled for ages, and ended up with an overworked rather clumsy piece.
I then decided to try to do another version of the simple cup that I had done at the beginning. Somehow that was harder, as I now had an expectation of being able to produce something I found attractive. I think I should have done a thicker sifting of powder to start with, and made the cup a bit bigger.
Both of these went into the kiln. As the pieces are tiny it is taking a long time to fill the kiln, which brings a novel problem. I get tempted to fiddle with work that is ‘done’. I added some shadow to the lettuce, then slightly dropped the piece when putting it back in the kiln- only a few millimetres, but it is enough to disturb the powder. I was bothered that I had no contrast between the side facing the light and that away from it and attempted to fix that problem