Because the professor of the ceramics lab has denied all of us permission to work in it over the summer, I am forced to turn to non-ceramic medium for continuing my practice.
The problem is that I am finding it hard to think of good things to paint or draw because I am too used to thinking in terms of sculpture. Read More…
Casey O’Connor, my professor spring quarter gave me a recipe for a glaze using nickel that comes out a dark shade of pink when fired at about cone 6 or 7. The chief fluxes in terms of mass are Barium Carbonate and Zinc Oxide. The pigment is Nickel at 1.5%.
I wanted to obtain a pigment that would oxidize red Read More…
I think I’ve gotten to the point where I’m really going to want a pickup truck to load sculptures into. Read More…
Well I have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is I used too much chromium in my tests… the tiles came back ranging from the typical dull green of normal chromium, becoming lighter and lighter with each addition of zinc. The best sample was a lime green, but it was very faint. The tin addition cause a greyish pinkish tone to occur. I was glad to see that.
The good news is two things: first of all with each addition of zinc, strange and interesting lumps began to occur on my tiles. The 5% Zinc, 5% Tin tile was a dull pink glossy, bumpy glaze that resembled skin with goosebumps, but glossy. Accidental discoveries are cool…. Read More…
Well I fired the lead glaze test tile as described before. It came out clear, smooth and not bubbly! If it had not come out clear, the alumina would have been too high, and if it had bubbled, the silica would have been too high or the alumina too low. This meas I correctly calibrated the frit into the recipe.
I have now performed the color tests I set out to achieve. Read More…
Well, sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been taking some time off and I didn’t want to bore you all.
So lets talk about lead in ceramics. First of all, know that in glazes there’s three types of materials. First their is Silica (the old name for SiO2), which forms glass when it melts. This forms the “Acid” of a glaze.
Then there is Alumina (Al2O3) and other like ingredients that follow a 2:3 ratio for their atoms and oxygen. These are referred to as “neutrals”. They help strengthen the Silica and make it run slower when it is molten. Without Alumina, Silica would just run right off of clay and drip all over the kiln. Zircopax (a combination of Zirconium and other elements) can also serve as a thickener, but it is more expensive and Alumina works better anyway.
Finally a large array of chemicals fall into the category of the flux or base, which follows a ratio of one or two atoms per molecule of oxygen (R2O or RO, where “R” is any element). These help Alumina and Silica melt by forming a eutectic point. If two or more solids are mixed together, the resulting mixture has a significantly lower melting point than the pure solids apart from each other.
Lead falls into this third category: PbO, where Pb stands for the Latin name for lead, Plumbum (which is also where the term “plumber” was derived from, since plumbing used to be made of lead pipes!). Read More…
Just a quick message to say hello to everyone who is watching Jim’s blog from his DeviantArt account. Jim’s been using DeviantArt for a long while now to share images of his finished artwork. He continues to use it to socially connect with people when it comes to his images and ideas, while this blog has become a record for getting from Point A to Point B, as well as exploring his ideas more in-depth and projecting different styles.
Jim continues to learn about all sorts of different styles and techniques through his university classes and independent research, and as they develop (or come to him in dreams…Jim talks in his sleep), this blog will continue to serve as a journal for him to express his ideas and styles.
In addition, Jim’s blog has continued to develop behind the special idea of showing readers, step by step, how art is created. We come very close to doing this in real-time. Over the past few months, readers have been able to watch Jim as he’s created some beautiful pieces, and have also been held at times in a state of anxiety as they wait for him to continue on or finish a piece.
This always was the idea behind the blog. It’s one thing to see a finished product, which is what you get on DeviantArt; it’s an entirely different thing to become a part of the experience and see how it’s created, which is what you’ll continue to get here.
Well I finished my art finally. It only took a few all niters in the past few weeks. These left me barely literate and hardly able to spell. Read More…
