This has a slightly narrower shape, and is smaller than the other weed cup.

Experimenting with photography again. This time I used the speaker stands/tripods to suspend a spotlight about 8 inches above the piece.  Husband and daughter held the other two spot lights, as non-diffused fill. On one hand, I think that the level of detail is acceptable, if not great, and the shadows aren’t distracting, but on the other hand, I don’t always have volunteers to hold hot and heavy spotlights.  Think I need a boom to hold the small aluminum heat-lamp, and I can use the speaker stands to hold the other spots.  I can use parchment or something to diffuse them.

This is the same dark brown clay I used in the “dark smiley” piece.  I like the color of the clay body, but it’s rather porous and soaks up glaze.  I needed something waxy and opaque to compete with it, and as I learned from the momiji cups, only white satin would do what I wanted it to. 

I don’t know what kind of plant this is. It was some sort of weed. I used one photograph as the basis for all the weed cups.  Something about the pale plant so clearly highlighted against the dark background made it stand out really well.

This was the sister cup to Momiji 1.  I was experimenting with glaze techniques, so I used a different one on this cup. For this cup, I used white satin glaze plus a shino.  Shinos can be a great way to bring out detail, especially details of depth.  While it’s interesting, it’s not quite what I was hoping for, as the Japanese maple design got obscured by the glaze.

I got the idea for this series of pieces from a link my friend showed me of an intricate ballpoint drawing on the outside of a styrofoam cup.  I wanted to do the same thing, but in ceramic.

For the design, I took about a hundred photos of plants while I was visiting a friend in Missouri.  I ended up using only two photos (that’s the way it goes.)  For this piece I used a photo of a branch of Japanese Maple held up against the sky.  I found that the problem with most photos of plants is that they are too detailed.  This one worked, as I was able to see the branch structure against the lighter background.

To incise the design into the clay, I used scraffito tools on leather-hard clay.  After it fired, I mixed some green stain with a waxy opaque white glaze, painted the entire piece with it, and then wiped it off, hoping that this would make the image come out better.  I’ve done this with straight stain on bisqueware and had great success with it.  Alas, the clay body is too porous, and too dark, and the glaze mostly burned away.