Fusion Mentorship - February Meeting

Well I an getting further and further behind in my blogging. Our mentorship group meets every  6 weeks so our next meeting was near the end of February - and with more bad driving weather - but not as bad as in January. It was a rather short meeting as three of our members were away.
I had managed to glaze some of my work as we had had a gas firing at the Guild, though i did not fire the nuclear teapot as I had broken the lid and needed to make another one.
The slab vase with the woman's face I ended up taking the suggestion from the last meeting and used a white glaze and so ended up glazing with white salt.

Glazed face vase with earring and nose stud not inserted yet.

However I just could not limit myself to one colour as had been suggested so that it would look like a stone carving, but had to add some Shaner Oribe  with a bit of Temmoku at the base. I forgot that I had used Bmix, which tends to turn the white salt yellowish as it picks up the iron from the clay. So was not that pleased with the piece. I plan to reglaze in electric with some white glaze over it.

For the Bottom Billion I had added some gold to the piece - this is the first time that I had used this type of china paint and I put on two coats and so a lot of it ran.. This totally obliterated the hands on the piece and it just looked a mess. I will bisque fire it to see if I can make the gold disappear.

The Bottom Billion - with gold lustre addition that ran

The second version of the Bottom Billion with the book (to indicate the book "The Bottom Billion") at the top,  I used a gosu (black) slip for the hands and then some blue slip under the hands. It was all glazed with Malcolm Davis Shino plus some Temmoku on the bottom. There was also a fish that was glued just under the neck and a tap in the middle under the hands - it was supposed to symbolize a tap to turn on the oil well. Well the whole thing did not turn out well - the hands ended up looking like sea anemones, the book on top was kind of lost - just way tooooooo  much going on. However the shino get great iridescence. Will have to revisit this concept from a fresh start.

Second version of the Bottom Billion - standing on an oil slick.

I was going to do a large plate with a woman holding a platter with something that would tie it into the bottom billion. It sat on my bench for a couple of weeks before I just ended up with a face on it. It was done over a garbage can (see post on garbage can platters from several years ago) and I added the extruded rim out of paper clay a few days later. I had some trouble with one of the large applique pieces lifting off - so not sure how it will fire, though I tried to fix it with paper clay. So that was it - I brought the bass player that I had also glazed as it was the only thing that I was really halfway pleased with. I seem to have diverged from my themes. I will have to try to stay on course in the next few months - get back to working as well on the Forest Theme, and the Nuclear Theme. I think that I wil drop the dancing ladies.