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.

attempting to get contours and highlights

finished cup

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