A Kick Up The Arts!

Last night our potter's guild hosted Neil Brownsword who grew up in Staffordshire. He trained at some of the house-hold name ceramic factories (such as Wedgewood), most of which have sadly now disappeared. In the late 1940's there were around 70,000 people directly employed in the pottery industry in that area, now the figure is closer to 5000 and the factories have been bulldozed.

Neil gave an overview of his work and motivations as well as a small demonstration of how to print onto clay using coloured slips. This is very quick work but as you can see from the images below, it can be messy work. Excellent!

Neil paints a plaster bat with a base colour of slip. He then scratches out his desired design in reverse, which he paints over with different colours.



















A piece of clay is rolled out to the desired size and shape. It is then painted with a base colour slip.


















The clay is then pressed against the plaster bat for a short time. Hopefully the image in the coloured slip will transfer to the clay...















The image is reveled! Not perfect but for the purposes of a demo, you get the idea. Once glazed, the image will show much more clearly.

















Maybe I can take some inspiration from this and use in my own work...