Saturday, January 15, 2011

oh the simple stencil



ever held a fabulous piece of pottery & thought how the heck did they do that?
well my approach for my regular work is fairly simple: slip & stencil.
slip being a liquid coloured clay that i mix up from a top secret recipe.
stencil being a basic mylar shape that i cut out. why mylar? so i can wash it off & use it again. a HUGE step up from when i first started using stencils & cut each one out from newspaper. paper works great but isn't reusable & thus very inefficient for any kind of "production"...
so i thought i'd share a bit of my basic process with some photos in case anyone is interested.











start with a leather hard piece, here a dipper bowl
























wet the stencil & adhere to the surface.
sometimes the stencil will lift in places & slip with go underneath, ruining your nice clear lines & making some work to clean the lines up.












poor slip over stencil (or dip piece into slip).
let it set up until it's no longer shiny












pull the stencil off & voila!

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