MudStuffing Sketchbook

The other day I was needing some momentum in getting some new decal imagery. My current mode or theme has been making the decals be images but used for the sake of pattern, or function as pattern. So not really going for geometric pattern, but using it in the same way you might see on an arts and crafts style pot. Of course I stray from this, sometimes a lot, but it’s been my ‘trigger’ I come back to when stuck for ’something’.

So after seeing Wilhem Staehle’s work and some skateboard shadow photos I saw on twitter. I started thinking about silohuettes and what I could use, whether I wanted to draw them or what. A few days laters I thought about shadow puppets and converted my photobooth to a shadow puppet stage - not really though, I just tacked up a batik cloth and put a light behind it. I thought this might give me a crisp enough shadow to use with either craft robo or decals. The batik cloth had a pattern on it, but it was the only “white-ish” cloth I had around. This turned out to be pretty cool none the less.

So here’s two shots of the booth with the cloth pulled away and what I used for shadows…

And here one of the first shots of a few daisys. It was trickier than I thought to get a nice crisp shadow cast - both because I really like how some shadows blurred and some didn’t (this wouldn’t make for a good ’shape’) and also the photo booth is only 2 feet deep, meaning the “depth of field” of the light/cast would be short. Placing the light farther away would have made it more crisp. Pretty cool how the shadow mimics the camera. But here it is straight up, with no adjustment to the photo, pretty blah…

So I cut a bunch of stuff out of the garden, both flowers and leaves and anything that had interesting shape and what not. About this time I was reminded of either something my little brother (Dave) said about animation (or maybe it was something I read that he linked to, regardless for some reason I associate it with him). It was something about how you know a character will make a good animation by how well it can be identified by it’s silouhette, or if the negative space has an interesting appeal… as in if you block in the character, if you can see and identify who it is or if it still reads well, then “all is good”. If the character is in a tight cannonball pose - no good. That’s why all these super heros look so much cooler when crouched down with one leg sticking out and wonderful negative space. Anyways, these were the thoughts in my head as I was taking pics, rotating flowers and trying to get the most interesting shapes possible. At this point I wasn’t concerned with pattern, just concerned with getting good negative space happening. Here’s the contact sheet of all the pics.

So… off to the computer and into photoshop we go… First step was to desaturate these of color. One of my favorite tools these days is use the “black and white” adjustment tool. It works very similar to the way red/orange/yellow filters work when making prints in a dark room, only you can adjust more colors. It allows you to either increase the amount variety in the photo when converting to black and white, or help you isolate objects. Either way, it gives you much more control than a simple desturate adjustment. In the first few photos below, I was going off on a tangent and using the b/w adjustment tool to help emphasize the pattern in the batiks fabric. Once it was converted to black and white grayscale, I punched up the constrast quite a bit with levels, and then laid over a layer of color and set the method to “overlay” to make it duotoned.

Now it was time to reign myself in and quit playing and get what I needed from these. Back in photoshop, I went back to the original photos and used the black and white tool to tone down the pattern in the batik fabric and increase the contrast of the shadow (same tool, but opposite effect of what I did in the previous photos). Once it was grayscale, I increased the contrast even more until it was stark black and white (with the Levels tool, but curves would work just as well). At this point, it’s pretty extreme - just black and white and not much gray. That’s what I want, but there’s a lot of noise. The shadow gets cleaned up with the paint brush, isolated from the background and then a gaussian blur filter is applied, and quickly followed up with another Levels adjustment to get it back to just black and white. What this does is softens the shape a bit, smooths it out, and too me defines it better than a shape with way too much detail. Below are a few of the cleaned up silouhettes, all the clutter has been removed, leaving me with a nice shape - and bringing us closer to becoming a motif.

These are saved as single bitmap (black and white colors only) tiffs.  The reason for converting to b/w bitmaps are: 1. File size is small and all we need is black and white for decals, 2. If I want to color them I can easily apply a color in illustrator, maintaining the silouette. I could stop right there, but I always like to be able to use stuff for multiple projects, so I convert these babies to vectors using Illustrators live trace tool.

Out of Photoshop and into Illustrator.

The reason for converting to vectors? All the reasons I like the bitmap format above, but also - when scaling up or down, there’s no loss of smooth edge, the file size is even smaller, and I can pull it into flash if I was to animate or something. Oh yeah, you can also stroke it, but that sounds so naughty! The live trace is a tricky tool to get right, but pretty dang powerful. I’ve found for decal work, downsampling the image to 300 dpi; 5 pixel path fitting  & 10 min area retains the shape I want, but makes a nice simple vector…

Once it’s in a vector form, I can easily flip, rotate, duplicate the shape (now I’m calling it a motif) however I want. One thing to point out, is the shapes above are basically what I would use for the decals, maybe duplicated or resized some, but essential just the black and white motif used to create patterns. The stuff below is sort of “play”. Illustrator lets me easily “play” with the motifs to see which ones are good and not so good. It’s going to give me a good sense of what’s possible with each motif when used on a pot. I don’t pre-plan how I lay the decals down on the pot - I have a general idea or direction, but it’s only when I see the decal on the pot when I can see it’s potentional. That’s why all the pots are different, even though I may re-use the images over and over again across more than one pot.

So, like I said, the images below give me a sense of the “pattern vocabulary” that can be developed with what I have.  Oh… one other thing you might notice is that some of the motifs are outlined. I did this using the artistic brushes in Illustrator, yet another benefit of converting it to a vector… If the solid black silouette is too heavy for a pot (heavy as in too much solid black), outlining it with an artistic brush is an easy way to “lighten” it up - weight wise, making it not so heavy. Here’s the daisy head and cosmo outlined with a brush.

Here’s some of the patterns I was playing around with, all done with the motifs you saw above.

And finally a little collage I had to get out of my system, combining the motifs, the photographs and some other images I had stockpiled:

Well, all this would be grand, since I have pots waiting to be decaled with these new images… sadly my love/hate relationship with printers is in a deep ‘hate’ phase, and unless she starts working today, I think I am going to have to start dating another printer. Since only a few printers work with the toner decals, I may have to settle for whatever I can find and get shipped quickly… I’ve got the Big Crafty coming up in a few weeks and I need to get the pots from the last firing embellished. All this and I am in seattle all next week.

A few of the items out of the last load was some more ceramic thermoses. I modified the design only slightly, but threw it different. It now had reed latches that secures the cup on top. I was surprised at how well it secured it, but it will handle a good shake. Most importantly no leaks. The others will be embellished with decals…

Very excited about this new load of pots, some are ripe for embellishing and others looks great as is. Big respect to my firing crew, Jeff, Gina, Greyson and Iva! Best load yet!

Also in the photos below are pots by Jeff Martin that were in there. See the whole flickr stream here:

I remember reading something in Jack Troy’s book about wood firing being a very community oriented process.  I felt a little uneasy reading that… I tend to be a bit of a recluse, popping around online when I felt social, but perfectly happy making stuff in my own little world, and always felt a little distant from the ceramic community at large (with Western NC being so rich with it, I’m almost ashamed to admit I don’t take much advantage of it). So there was a little sense of doubt that my woodfiring experience would suffer a bit.

Not so.

I’ve only had 4 firings in the new kiln so far. The first one I did alone, but all the others I have had the great pleasure having help. Aside from the satisfaction of actively participating in the final step in the ceramic process, it’s been amazing to feel a little more in touch with other artists.

Ben Stark and the LaPella’s were the first to help (they also helped stack bricks - thank you!), bringing along their two boys - who were dying to go home after a few hours, but Lisa and Alex were compelled to see the kiln to temp.

Next was Jim Bridgeman, who came up on a quiet weekday to help fire. Jim seemed to have a natural sense about stoking, feeding in wood at a balanced rate and easily bringing the temp up on “his side”, as I was trying to keep up.

Yesterday, Jeff Martin was here and it’s the first time I had a chance to fire someone else’s pots in the kiln (still waiting for them to cool to see how they turned out). In fact yesterday was a first of a lot of firsts… my sculpture was once fired, first time for once firing anything, first time to have big pots in the kiln (Jeff’s pot was about 2 1/2 feet tall). Gina and Greyson also put in time in front of the firebox, Greyson’s knack for stoking was even more impressive than Jim’s - everytime I peaked in his firebox, he had nice neat rows of wood, evenly spread across the grates, slowly pushing them in little by little.

On an online whim, I mentioned to Ruth Apter (from Washington State) to stop by if she had time on her visit to Western NC, she did and brought along Jim Whalen (who lives right down the road). We had a great visit with them right as the kiln got to temp and I finished spraying soda.

So today, as with most day-after-the-firing days, I am feeling quiet and thinking how great it was to meet and visit with these new friends and how to the kiln has started to created it’s own little community on it’s own, despite my anti-social tendancies.

Below are some pics of what’s inside the kiln, cooling right now, plus Jeff has been posting videos on Facebook you can check out.

Jeff’s pot in on the left, gumball machines, bottom center, pancakers in back…
and a rare site… some plates!

I love this shot of the firebox…

Good soda coverage in this load…

My chair… too bad I can’t sit in it when stoking…

I was pretty tickled when Madeleine convo’ed me these images of her Gumball Machine. She used the directions from my Pottery Making Illustrated article. It’s the first time I’ve seen the end result of a project I wrote, and it’s a pretty cool feeling, plus I think she did an awesome job of taking and idea making it her own. You can check out more of her ceramic work in her Etsy shop.