Addiction!

I have a confession to make... I am addicted. It has a grip on my life that I can't shake... I wake up in the morning, and can't function without it. I do it in between errands, late at night, at lunch time...

Oh of course you guessed it... no, not drugs or drinking... not caffeine or chocolate... yes, the internet. (no, not THAT part of the internet, either!) Just the plain old internet, checking on blogs and friends, listening at noon to my favorite podcast, keeping in touch with the world throughout the day.

I don't watch TV hardly at all, except for an occasional "Deadliest Catch" or if Bob tells me that there's a good Mythbusters on. Sometimes a little news in the morning, sometimes a little Weather Channel if we're having some weird weather going on... oh, and of course when we had the bad fires, we had our local station on 24/7. Other than that, nada.

So yesterday, when the internet went from intermittent to nonexistent, I had withdrawals. Got the shakes. Called tech support, couldn't get it fixed (but the young lady had lovely English, with just a touch of Hindi) It finally took a total of three calls to tech support, and my son Bob, who had to bypass the router and redo the cable from the modem to the computer. So, thank GOODNESS we have our internet back!

Speaking of my favorite blogger... I don't usually talk politics, it just isn't a good idea to bring politics into a relationship where I know that some of my customers will be of a different 'flavor'. But my husband was in the Navy for 14 years, and I was a Navy wife before I was a ceramist, so you will have to forgive me if this isn't your cuppa tea, but for those of you who are interested, there is a contest going on, that will buy care packages for our troops. Ed Morrissey has been my favorite blogger since soon after 9/11, and even though he is now part of a larger blog, I still think that his no-nonsense, slightly libertarian, Minnesota-nice way of looking at politics is the closest to my own feelings. No one will ever agree on every single thing, but Ed is pleasant to listen to, thoughtful, and reasonable. I listen to his podcast at noon every day that I can. Anyway, if you would like to contribute to the purchasing of care packages for the troops (and be on Ed's team, the Steamers) please click here. Just some simple items for our troop's comfort...

Taboo, on a rainy Saturday

Whoo-hoo, it's RAINING! We don't often get rain in June, so we are delighting in the feeling of cozy contentment as we watch the rain come down. Well, except for poor Hubby, out working on electrical sub-stations while the rain runs down his neck.
Well, hey, at least *I'm* enjoying the rain *wink*

I just listed a Taboo to MyAuctionBarn, an extra fancy red dun with subtle barring and lots of great detail. You can find him here. Quick three-day auction, for a really nice custom glaze ready to go out and show!

Hope everyone else is having a nice day, too, whether rainy or sunny.

Mayhem is a gathering that happens most every May, and involves a great deal of eating. In between eating (since you can't eat ALL day, no matter how hard you try!) we sit and make shiny horses.

The story starts a few weeks before Mayhem, as I worked feverishly to finish the Taboo mold. Lesli Kathman had done the molds on Imp and Vixen, but she turned the stallion over to me, since she'd had enough rubber pouring and plaster scraping for a while. I decided that I wanted the Taboos to be done in time for Mayhem, so that Lesli and Sarah and Lynn and I would all have one or two to play with. Lesli was bringing Imps and Vixens, and how could the family be incomplete? So, the moldmaking was rushed but the molds turned out all right (except for his left ear, which has to be hand formed each time from these molds) I also finished enough Brownies to bring each gal one.
I arrived at Mayhem with bisques, as did Lesli, and we started painting and working on them. I decided to strive to finish two... one Taboo and one Brownie, for sale when I got home to pay for the trip. I also painted my Imp. Then, I could finish my Vixen at home when I wouldn't be rushed or distracted. Since Lesli has allowed me to make extra Taboos in exchange for having made the mold, I didn't mind selling the first one... in fact, I was highly looking forward to it. (My first mistake)
You have to understand about Boise, and Mayhem, and the way it works. We sit in Sarah's garage, beautifully laid out as a work space, and it increasingly fills with boxes, paints, food items, bubble wrap, tools, randomly placed items, and our ever expanding girths as we go out at least twice a day... usually three times... for meals in the excellent restaurants surrounding the area. This time, we initiated our visit with Thai food from the Sa-Wa-Dee, and I was delighted to drink tea from the Elephant teapot again. So, we begin working and filling up space, and eating and digesting, and talking and laughing, and I'm trying hard to finish those two little shiny beasties in time to bring them home finished. And, being small, they don't take as much work as... say, a Stormwatch... so I actually did pretty well. The Brownie served double duty, as he allowed me to show the girls how I freehand airbrush and then clean up the edges with an eraser, for a softer but still defined pattern. I have that process down pat, and did him fairly quickly. He was given an undercoat of a yellow-beige, that was rubbed away from the high areas, so that it sunk into his coat and gave it depth. The Taboo took more time... masking off the teeeeny tiiiiiny mane took forever...but I painted him a bright "Voltage" chestnut with a lighter mane and tail. He has a darling nose marking too, and I was pleased with his detailing. It's a good color on him, shows off his musculature and detail, without being too fancy. Soooo..... it came time to glaze them. I decided to do something different. (My second mistake) Matte or satin glazes are harder to do than glossy, and Lynn Fraley has been getting such good results with her matte/satins, that I decided that the crowning touch would be a nice matte glaze on these beasties. So, I asked Lynn for the tips for success on the Laguna matte, of which Sarah had an unopened jar. "Don't apply too heavily, and don't overcook".... okay, no problem. I tend to apply glazes lightly anyway, and it's no big deal to run them through twice, rather than getting them too heavy. So, I sprayed the Taboo and the Brownie with the Laguna clear matte. I also sprayed a little wonderful plaque that Sarah had donated to the glazing chaos, and that Lesli had painted.
We started the kiln, and probably went out to eat, and the next morning....




Oh DAMN!!!



We opened the kiln, and just stared at the Brownie and Taboo. The Taboo didn't look too bad on first glance, since he was chestnut. But the Brownie looked like... well...like he had rolled in urine. He was bright translucent matte yellow, with his grey pattern showing underneath! I thought for a few minutes that I had just over-hit him with the yellow undercoat, but I realized that even if I had, the high parts of his coat would still be white, since they were rubbed off thoroughly. Nope, he was varying shades of yellow all over. Even over his eyes, like he was blind or something. YUCK!!! The Taboo, close up, had the same problem... especially his forehand. His facial shading that had really been gorgeous, was overlaid with yellow. And his blaze was yellow!
Here I had been, all happy about finishing early, bragging on how I had done my work and could just coast for the last day of the visit, and the Glaze Gods had heard me and jerked the rug out from under me. They do that, every once in a while. The unopened jar of glaze had been mis-marked. I looked at it again, several times, and it was clearly marked "clear matte" with no mention of "pee-yellow"!

So, I applied some gloss glaze over the top and ran them through again, and while it did help, it didn't make them good enough to sell. I plan to run them through again, a few times maybe, and also apply some paint over the top to see if they can be fixed. The Brownie might turn out all right, but the Taboo is probably never going to leave my case. I won't sell a substandard piece, and would rather keep him as a reminder of what happens when you get over confident. His name? Hubris.
Of course.


The other parts of Mayhem were great, we had a lot of fun, and the visit to Lynn and Barry was way too short! Lynn made us up boxes of china paints, mixing mediums, and glazed pieces to play with, and gave us a tutorial on airbrushing china paints, which was something that I am anxious to try. And, in keeping with the eating theme, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Lynn makes the tastiest spicy pecans that the world has ever seen.

So, that's the story of my Mayhem (and see Lesli's blog for her post-Mayhem misfortunes, poor Lesli!) I came home and had to make something quick, to pay the incoming bills, so I did another Taboo in a satin dapple grey and sold him immediately. (photos below)


































Here is the Imp, done in a glossy highlighted buckskin. Good gracious, he is tiny! You can't believe all the little detail. My camera just isn't able to take pictures that show him off properly, but you get the idea.

Happy April Fools Day!

Well, apparently April Fools Day is upon us. I put up a long post but can't seem to get the pictures to resize correctly, and it's time to go out and work. So, here is just the end of the post, with the one picture that seems to fit properly into the frame of the blog! I'll try again tonight...

When you do ceramics, you find that little silly ideas can actually be realized. If you can mold it or sculpt it, you can make it shiny! I did this little Casper the Circus Dog for Sarah M as a present a few years ago. He's the standard Casper ornament, but I lopped off his head and inserted a frilly Circus collar. Then I opened his mouth and sculpted a tongue and teeth, and finally put a hat on him. He stands on a custom made circus drum. Fun!



Joanie

End of an Era

When I started Pour Horse, I had no idea where it would lead. That was, what, fourteen years ago? Fourteen years. So many ups and downs, so many triumphs and tragedies. Learning processes, changing technologies, and just plain nose-to-the-grindstone working. Day in and day out, clay on my clothes, plaster all over the counter. Greenware piled on shelves, cushioned with random torn off pieces of foam rubber. The smell of the kiln, hot metal and brick, click and buzz as it heats, snapping as it cools. From making my own clay slip, to making the molds, to casting, cleaning, painting, glazing and shipping... all of it, here, has been woven into my life tapestry and become part of my identity.

So, having announced the end of Original Finish production runs when Otto is finished, it is with mixed feelings that I look toward the future. For the first time in fourteen years, I'm finishing a run and not already working on another one. No mailing to go out, no updating of the name list, no molds to frantically make, no production photo to take out on the cliff. I've done over *three thousand* horses in those fourteen years, most of them Original Finish limited production pieces. Otto was by far the hardest, being the most detailed and complicated of the sculptures. Otto is cast in four molds and his head and forelegs are attached during the cleaning process. His paint job is also quite complex, and the color has varied greatly over the time span of his production. It took three years to finish Otto. But I did it, by golly. I did it. To have a visual representation of what kind of work that entails, Lesli Kathman kindly helped my by doing this graphic:
(click on it for a bigger photo)



Now remember that for every fifteen or so of these, I had to make a new set of molds, which took one or two days to do. And this doesn't represent the broken ones, the bisques, the goofs, or the customs. This is only the OF pieces. It's rather startling, isn't it? But somehow, I still feel a little sad at the thought that I won't be doing another run. Like my family says, "it's like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, because it feels so good when you stop". I need to put the hammer down now.

There are so many fantastic horses still to make, sculptures to bring to life, and fun projects to do. My studio is full of customs and new ideas. The airbrush is beckoning, to try out new ways of painting, new ways of dappling, roaning, or glazing. With the moldmaking techniques that we can now bring to bear on new sculptures, we can make almost any horse. We are limited only by our dreams. My dream was Pour Horse, and I am grateful for everyone who has been a customer and a friend. We've seen a lot of changes together, haven't we? And now we go into a new phase, where more possibilities open up for going down artistic pathways and exploring new trends and ideas.

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a Brownie

The Brownie mold is successful, and here are the clinkies to prove it... some of the first Brownies are out of the kiln and looking good! Nappe sold immediately, and is going to live in the Pacific Northwest for a while. Kaibito is at auction right now, the auction ends Monday, Feb. 8th, so go and visit him at MyAuctionBarn.

It's incredible how much detail this little guy has, with his really deep hair whorls and fuzzy fuzzy-wozzieness. His little eyes are peeking out from under his donkey bangs, and his little hooves are twinkling in a caper. He's a joy to paint!

I've been naming them after geological formations and Grand Canyon locations, the geological formations came from a search for "brownies, imps, pixies" which lead to a website with the names of all of the Little Folk in every language. One name caught my eye, it was Norwegian for a water feature, and another was some sort of geological formation. They seemed to be apt, and the geological names lead me to the Grand Canyon, which is of course one of the most interesting of geological artifacts. Since a donkey was found on Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon, abandoned by the miner who must have perished in the Canyon... the donkey was later named "Brighty", as you probably know... the Grand Canyon names seemed to suit. So, here are the first of the Brownies and their names. There will eventually be a page on the Pour Horse site with all of the glazed Brownies. (clicking on these photos will give you bigger ones)

Klippe:



Nappe:




Kaibito:


Coconino:




There will be many more Brownies later, but now that these are done, I have to get back to the LAST EIGHT OTTOS!!!! WHOO HOO!!! And a backlog of customs that need to be finished. Have to get caught up a bit before I can feel good about playing with Brownies again, so look for them in the future!

It just makes me so happy...

Anyone who knows me, knows that I passionately love my dogs. I love to talk about them, show them off, and spend most of each day with them. So, when I saw how talented Kelly Savage was with dog portraits, I approached her about doing my three furchildren.
She agreed, and I can't be more excited. Kelly has taken an amazing amount of time, gathering information and photos of the dogs. She has asked questions until she has a good image in her mind of, not only what they look like, but what their personalities and quirks are.
I've worked with some of the most talented artists in the model horse world, and I truly appreciate the professionalism and the seriousness with which Kelly has approached this project.
You can watch the progress on her blog, here. She also has some extraordinary sculptures and paint jobs, and is definitely a force in our world, but right now all I can think about is how pleased I am with the progress of the project, and how exciting it is to watch as the portraits will be taking shape. The composition of the photos is spot-on, her choice of each photo really does capture the inner essence of each dog. She's right that Casper has a 'glint of wisdom', indeed, he is something of an 'old soul'. Bear is just a rollicking goofball with a mane, and Yasha is, as always, alert and aware.

Don't worry, Kelly, that Boxing Shire will be yours.. and something else besides. I've done a lot of trades, for horses and tile work and molds, but this trade gives me more joy than I can describe.