Part 5: Exercise - Authorial practice (your own work)

 A GALLERY OF A COLLECTION OF WORK FROM MY SKETCHBOOKS

Pencil sketch of a warthog

Felt tip, fine liner and smudged pencil

Pencil

Red pencil and crayon

Black fineliner

Pencil

Pen, ideas for applying to ceramics

Watercolour pencils

Fine-liner and pen above: the series of foodie pictures and people pictures are the ones I enjoy the most.


Notes on my gallery pictures:

while I have chosen to use my pencil sketch of the Gaugin's  painting  '2 Tahitan women' below, this choice is based purely, as the exercise suggests, on my subjective decision based on the concept and the plan for the execution of this drawing onto ceramics.

Two Tahitian Women (with Blossoms by Paul Gaugin)
[Accessed 6 November 2014 https//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Tahitian-Women]

I honed in on the 2 Tahitan women and took a drawing of one of the Tahitan faces, above, to a pottery studio along with a printout of the original painting above. I chose to do this particular drawing because  the shadows and angular features are simple enough to use in block form on ceramics. I also liked the woman's expression and thought this would translate nicely - I have never seen portrait painting in this form on a very large plate.



Ceramics are quite unforgiving when painted as each mark that is made, shows through and nothing can be erased. An advantage is that you can draw your image in pencil onto the cermic object and the lead will 'burn' off in the kiln or oven as the paint or glaze bakes.

I have painted on ceramics before and did a plate - below: the application of orange paint in the middle had to be done in three layers to get a thick coating enough to look smooth.



I approached the portrait exercise using four colours of ceramic paint: orange, black and 2 greys, using white space as a colour also.


The end result is that each colour bakes to a different tint. The paints also cannot be pre-mixed and cannot be blended or rubbed in together, so there were certain challenges and limitations within which to work.

I picked orange as a main colour to depict the sun and heat. The background orange brushstrokes on the pottery were used to depict this. I used black and two types of grey for tone. The mistakes in the tonal placements on the woman's face are mistakes that I could not fix.
Below - my brushstrokes left their mark but some of the mistakes actually worked to form other shadows.





Above - using one coat of orange, light brushstrokes for a 'sunshine' effect.

The plate was fired in a kiln (oven) in a professional pottery studio by Julia of
 - www.juliakceramics.co.za

The final product is large - the dimension of the plate is 56cm in diameter - this made it easy to paint. 






My tutor suggested an interesting reference - the Picasso Plates by Pablo Picasso. Looking at his application I see that he has used the difficulty of the medium to his advantage .ie. the fact that all brushstrokes are recorded on ceramics, and this gives a naive look to some of his work.

Source: www.the-maac.com [Accessed 10 March 2016]



Source: www.onlinegalleries.com [Accessed 9 March 2016]