These were porcelain cups that originally had handles except that they dried too fast and the handles got cracks, so I removed them and made them into tea bowls instead. I painted a thin black stain on it called “Seth’s Black Ink” after a ceramicist who uses this technique. After the stain dried, I scratched it away using scratchboard tools. It’s a horrible process, because I have a visceral aversion to the dryness and the dust and that atrocious scratching sound, but I love the way it looks.
That is, I would have loved the way it looked, had it turned out the way I wanted. If you fire it to cone 5, the black is jet black and the white is white, and it’s fantastic. But porcelain isn’t functional at cone 5 like it is at cone 10, so I fired it higher.
2 comments
i think it’s still fantastic!
The crow is elegant. It’s very subtle.