Plate 10 - Vandels plate fired!

Figure 1: The center of Vandal's plate with his device, Quarterly sable and purpure, a mascle and a bordure argent. So simple, so effective, so hard to ensure it's symmetrical.

This plate has only been at Glazeit for three weeks waiting for me to collect it but I present plate no. 10, Vandal's household plate in all it's baked glory.

 

Figure 2: The complete, fired plate - finally!

You can see the limbs of the rising sun are not evenly coloured, again. I had thought this problem with my household plate was due to the fact it was my first. I was extra diligent with ensuring this plate had the requisite three even coats but it appears that I didn't succeed. I don't want to put more than three layers on as I suspect that underglaze that is too thick might flake off. I think I'll avoid large single colour areas for now until I have a solution.

Squeezie bottles

Even though I was working with a known design I got the chance to try something new for this plate. Sigel (sp?) of Glazeit introduced me to squeezie bottles of glaze. Like silk paints they have a thin nozzle and allow you to make thin-ish lines and dots. I used them for all the blue background fill sections (Fig 3). You can see the spirals aren't as smooth as they were on my plate as I can only do a single run and my hand isn't that steady in movement and strength of squeeze. I also used the squeeze bottles to do the squids (for want of a better term). The smoothness of the pigment isn't that good when you look at the head of the squid. This method clearly only works for lines and dots.

It is ALOT less time consuming than outlining each spiral three times. Oh, how I wish I knew of thise technique when I did Gab's and Stanzi's plates.Though, I'm happy with the neatness on them, and probably wouldn't have been as happy with the squeeze bottle results. I probably wouldn't have the wrist strength back then either to complete a whole plate.

Figure 3: Close up (slightly blurry, sorry) of the blue background fill.

For the first in this set (and my first ceramic experiment) go here.