Hand-painted Functional Art

Over the next few weeks, I'll be gradually listing more goodies in the shop. But I thought in the meantime, I'd show some of the ceramic pieces I've painted lately. Generally speaking, and I really wish this sounded more modest, I'm pretty good at painting. I love both oils and acrylics, but recently, due to my job, I've found a new fascination with ceramic glazes. They're so much more challenging than any other paints I've used, due largely to the fact that they change so drastically when they go through the kiln. It's always quite a surprise.

This first piece is my lil' baby. I worked on it for a whole month and it's the first in a series of pie plates I'm doing that depict juxtopositions with the sweet pies they'll one day contain. This has a serene sky on the outside and a flock of dead blackbirds within.

The cool thing about pie plates is that you can do some crazy stuff to them, since the artwork is getting covered up and then gradually becomes visible. I just love that.

This next piece is an octopus sushi platter. I never eat this much sushi, but I love the long shape of the piece and thought it'd be fun to do something dramatic. A little hard to tell, but the octopus is actually a dark chocolate brown.

I'll post more images a little later. It seems Blogger is having issues with my file sizes (what can I say? I like large picture files).