46 Days until ACC Baltimore: veneer tests await

You may have heard that my work has been accepted into the American Crafts Council 34th Annual Trade Show in Baltimore. Their site: http://craftcouncil.org/ I'm excited to the point of hyperventilation. I don't know if I can manage the logistics in order to go and make a good impression. In order to help me make up my mind, I need to convince myself that I can make my work a little faster without losing the control I want.

I'm fond of deadlines, just like the old saying says. The show, bigger and more elaborate than anything I've tried so far, is literally around the corner. However, my eyes are not yet focused on February 23rd-28th. The next few days --until the 11th of Jan-- I have to prove to myself that the new decorating method works, because if it doesn't, I should wait until next year.

A bit of history. I draw lots of patterns on paper with my favorite black thin pen. These patterns form the basis for decorations on ceramic things, from pottery, to sculpture, to little whistles shaped like animals. But at the moment, my pen and paper drawings are far more detailed than I can achieve on ceramics. I'd like to close that gap in time to go to Baltimore.

When making patterns on ceramics, I like to hand-draw the pattern on the blank piece and then color it in with ceramic underglazes and glazes, much like you might see someone using a coloring book. I'm pretty fast at drawing a pattern on the piece, but it takes a while to fill in the colors since the patterns are usually pretty complex. I learned this the hard way after struggling to get out a bunch of orders. I decided to improve the process, and have decided to borrow a technique from polymer clay jewelers and sculptors.

Veneer, Murrini, Laminate: Whatever you want to call it, it is faster than handpainting. (A term often used is millefiore, which specifically refers to flower patterns, since it means thousand flowers in Italian.) This decorative process involves building the pattern not just in two dimensions -as you would draw it on paper-- but in 3D format. Think of a log or loaf or some other shape. The pattern runs in one direction through the block or the log. Thin slices of material are taken from the face that runs 90 degrees to the pattern, sometimes a few degrees less. You might remember seeing the way cheese or meat is sliced at the deli counter. Every thin slice of the block or log yields the pattern.

Many ceramics artists already use this technique in their work. While all of the work I see using similar techniques is lovely, specific challenges will have to be overcome before the technique outperforms my handpainting:

(1) Are my patterns too complicated for veneers in my chosen size range? Polymer clay artists achieve breathtakingly detailed patterns with intense colors and very clean transitions between colors. However, waterbased clay used for slip casting and handbuilding and wheelforming is generally coarser than the polymer clays. Will it work? That's what I need to find out. Problems include loss of small details due to the coarseness of the material, unacceptable distortion of pattern when laminated onto blank form, boring color intensities.

Encouraginly, even if I am a bit disappointed by the resolution I can achieve building the patterned loaves, --with only a couple of weeks of experience building them--it will still be much smaller than I can render by hand directly on the piece with the marking tools available for ceramics It will certainly be faster. I'm going to be laminating the patterns onto animal shaped whistles in the 2-3 inch range, ceramic boxes between 3-5 inches on a side, and onto vases that are a good bit larger. I'm only worried about the animal whistles.

(2) Can I apply the veneers quickly? This seems to be true, and will cut down my decoration time from 15-30 minutes to as few as 5. Dare I hope for even less time? This is very encouraging, and I'll be watching the clock closely. The convenient thing here is that I can devise dozens of different patterns, and they all apply equally quickly, whereas before, when patterning the work by hand, a few minutes more drawing meant 15-30 minutes more painting.

Note that the time to build the veneer or laminate blocks will take some time, and will vary widely. So the next consideration is

(3) How many slices can be gotten from one log? Based on quick tests, I can get a slice of 1-2 mm, and probably closer to 1mm with consistent practice. If my log is 120 mm long, I can expect to lose 10-15 mm for natural distortion at the ends. I would get around 100 slices. If one slice covers a bird whistle, I've made enough patterns for 100 bird whistles. The log itself might take 50 minutes to build. Distributing the log-building time into the number of slices available, that's 30 seconds per slice of prep time. I can't even sharpen the pencil that fast. But will they outperform handpainting? Oh, my will it! The question is only a matter of measuring how much. As a time gauge, if I could hand paint, say, 5 birds an hour, such that 100 bird whistles would take a mind-numbing 20 hours if I perform like a machine. On the other hand, if a laminate takes 5 minutes to apply, then the time to decorate 100 whistles plunges to less than 9 hours.

Moreover, the effort to build the log and apply the slices is methodical and relatively easy, whereas handpainting requires constant attention.

I sure hope this works, eh?

More to come as experiments continue.