Last weekend was a great weekend. My race medals hit the market AND my dad and brother finally made it down to help me start building a clay studio. The plan, in a nutshell, is to put up some dividing walls in the basement and add more light and electricity. Here is what the “clay side” of the basement looked like before we started.

If you’ve been keeping score at home you probably noticed that I removed the “clay bubble” to give us room to work. Look at all the room! We made a trip to Lowes and got some wood and fluorescent lights and other necessary items and got to work. We worked most of the day, only taking a break to eat my wife’s awesome lasagna. They headed back home around 5:30. We got all the studs cut and I got to use a nifty nail gun to help put them in place. My brother got some of the electrical work done. Now the “paint side” lights can be operated with switches instead of pull chains and my wife actually has a decent amount of light in her new laundry room. Here are some pictures of construction in progress and where we stopped at the end of day 1.

As you can tell, these walls probably won’t keep much clay dust from flying around. But I will probably put up some plastic for now and the next time they come down we’ll go get some drywall and finish the lights and outlets. I’ve already been setting up the studio. I took apart the white shelves and put together my clay table. Maybe next weekend I’ll have my wheel set up…

Another milestone of my art career has been reached, this time in the clay department. I recently completed my very first commissioned ceramic work. Brian Shepherd, notorious for putting on, running in, and promoting 5K and 1 mile races, asked me to create some awards for the annual Think Spring Run this year. He wanted a total of almost 70 medals in 3 different sizes for the race held on March 1st.

I started by deciding the size and shape. Since there was such a large quantity I decided to press clay into plastic lids to get the round shape with a ridge. I carved the letters into the prototype by hand and then poured plaster onto it to make a stamp to use for the rest of the medals. After molding and stamping I added a little design around the edge and then cleaned them up when they were leather hard. I bisque fired them with a few other things that I’ve been working on and then my wife helped me glaze them. We dipped them in one of 3 different low fire glazes from Amaco. The biggest medals were glazed with Peacock which was supposed to be a neat blue-green color but for some reason it came out brown. It looks good as long as you aren’t expecting blue-green… After they were fired I attached some strips of leather so they could be hung around the necks of the top runners. I didn’t get to go to the race but I heard that people liked them.

designing and glazing

fired and finished