handmade bowls

My Obvara Raku Bowls

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Here is the first batch of my obvara raku pieces from my Dakota Potters Supply workshop on October 21, 2023 - I made enough that I plan to publish three posts covering the artwork! This post shares my obvara bowls and bowl-like vessels.

Again, as background, obvara is a low-fire scalding-and-sealing process wherein you create a fermented sourdough/beer bath, plunge approximately 980°C naked ceramics fresh out of the kiln into it, wait for them to start to bloom with different tan-to-brown markings, and then arrest the surface carbonization process by rinsing the pieces off in a water bath.

The obvara process itself scalds and somewhat seals the surface of the pottery, but I went ahead and added a thin layer of kitchen wax to these pieces as well for extra protection and sheen unification. All of the below images in each gallery row are of the same artwork from different angles.

This first open bowl has a smooth surface!

This second piece is another open bowl, but this time the surface has some light texture as well as a more variable form.

This third piece is smooth and a bit more closed, though there’s a quite variable lip. All of the pieces I’ll be showing you are handbuilt, pinch-pot designs.

Next we have another smooth and even more closed vessel! This one was a favorite of my fellow workshop attendees; they loved how the obvara surface turned out.

While you can click into each of the above images to see them larger, I want to close this post out with just one large image of the last smooth bowl I made!

An obvara raku handbuilt bowl by artist Shelby Prindaville.

More Raku!

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You got a sneak peek at some of my recent raku work in my exhibition shots from Functional Aesthetic, but here is the full reveal!

Above are three photos of one “baked potato” bowl. I used my own hair again as well as sugar for the carbonized marks on this piece.

This vase is very difficult to photograph well; it’s currently on exhibit, but once it comes back I’m going to see if I can capture it a bit better digitally. A couple of my friends who viewed the show said this was their favorite piece of mine. The way the glaze dots turned out reminds me of inset abalone shell.

This piece certainly didn’t turn out as planned; I experimented with a turquoise crackle glaze, but I really did not like the way the color came out, so we went ahead and re-fired it. I much prefer this hammered copper look!

This above bowl is decently large, and I chose to do the outside in a relatively matte glaze while the inside is a high gloss. It gives me dragon egg vibes. The Functional Aesthetic curator placed this piece in the choicest display spot, and I learned today that it was sold! I did see a viewer admiring it and gesturing to and around it at the reception, so I wonder if she’ll be providing its new home or if a different patron snapped it up.

This above vessel is kind of football-shaped, and its surface reminds me of a somewhat aged/stained city map. It has my own hair and sugar burned into the white crackle surface. I am quite into this piece.

I was really excited about how this piece turned out, as it’s adding into the “broken egg” series of clear crackle pieces I’m developing. The shape is hard to convey in photo, but it leans in a way that feels quite anthropomorphic - at least to me!

This bowl was intended to be another in the “broken egg” series, but it cracked coming out of the kiln due to the thermal shock and my thin walls. That’s more literal than I’d like for the “broken eggs” to be. It is still in one piece, but even after I epoxy over the crack (which I plan to do to bolster its structural integrity), it will have that weakness as it’s a fairly sizeable crack. I’m not sure if given the severity of the crack if I’ll want to display this piece, but if I do I plan to list it as NFS (not for sale).

And here is yet another casualty; however, this football-shaped vessel’s crack is more minor.

More Stoneware Ceramics!

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I’ve been posting about my raku productivity of late, but I have also continued to make stoneware pottery too!

I really like the combination of two glazes - standard Cone 6 recipes for a white and “smoky brown.” I particularly like the crawling that frequently results. I sometimes add in a complementing lighter grey glaze which is a discard mix of my own creation and therefore likely very difficult to reproduce once gone.

Below are eight different pieces. They include, respectively, a bowl, two images of a planter, two more of a second bowl, a third bowl, two images of a dish, a fourth bowl, two images of a fifth smaller bowl, and two images of a sixth bowl.

Second Raku Workshop - Copper Glazes Edition

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I decided to try copper glazes again, but with some wild cards thrown in - I experimented more with unglazed negative spaces, and tested out some different types of glaze.

This first piece has “Midnight Luster” glaze on the interior and a lithium carbonate glaze on the exterior. It’s quite attractive in photo, but it did suffer from a bit of pitting, meaning the glaze pooled in some spots and it bubbled and hardened in ways that are suboptimal; instead of a smooth surface, there are rougher points within.

This next piece is interesting in that I had intended it to be a more standard bowl, but in the bisque firing process its sidewall accidentally got damaged and it was involuntarily edited into the shape it has now. I sanded it down a bit and decided to move forward with it; I can imagine that the cavity might improve accessibility to whatever is stored within!

I was pretty proud of this platter as a handbuilt piece, but unfortunately though it made it through the bisque firing unscathed it was unable to handle the temperature fluctuations of the raku firing and it sustained a crack across about 2/3 of its base. It is not salable now, but I still wanted to share the piece with you!

Finally, here is the most experimental piece of the metallic batch - I used both “Emerald Copper” glaze and a thinned out crackle glaze to create the exterior dripping decoration, and used “Midnight Luster” on the interior. The bottom of the exterior is just the result of carbon trapping in unglazed raku clay.

First Raku Workshop Pieces - Copper Glazes Edition

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Here are my copper glaze pieces! These all turned out beautifully, but let me tell you - I learned that I cannot control what I’m going to get, at least not with all the variables that were at play at this raku workshop! The local temperature and humidity, the time in transferring from kiln to reduction, the organics used, the timing and duration of any burps (adding oxygen back into the reduction environment) - each and every factor influences the final color, shine, and character.

Amusingly enough, from having surveyed some sample pieces in advance of glazing, I determined I quite liked lithium carbonate as the interior glaze and used it on the inside of all four of my copper pieces. For the lips and exteriors, I tried out a few different options - some more lithium carbonate with a touch of Molly’s banding purple, emerald copper, golden rainbow, midnight luster… and a couple of the exteriors look almost identical despite or perhaps because of my experimentation, in concert with the rest of the environmental factors! (Because the exterior glazes didn’t align with my expectations of them, I don’t remember which specific bowls got which exterior glazes.)

In this first bowl, the lithium carbonate interior is matte and relatively dull, and it provides a stark contrast to the dark shiny rainbow lip and exterior of the bowl.

This second, smaller bowl - like every bowl here - has lithium carbonate on the inside, but this time it resulted in a satin, coppery base and a high gloss, pink-and-rainbow interior side. The exterior is also high gloss but contrasts the interior with silvers, golds, and aqua hues, accented by some sooty squiggles. This is perhaps the loudest bowl, and it gives me a unicorn cupcake vibe.

Here is the third bowl! In many ways it’s the most subtle of the four, but it is nevertheless quite rich. The lithium carbonate here developed a semi-gloss interior that has a lot of variation, rings, and finely-detailed contrast. The exterior reflects some of the same color palette of the interior, but it adds some turquoise and blue into the mix and has a higher gloss.

Finally, we come to my favorite piece from the whole day! This bowl is really nice. The lithium carbonate interior here has a high gloss and is very coppery with splashes of blue and purple and finely detailed contrast. It is complemented by a high gloss dark rainbow exterior that is very reminiscent of the first bowl and pretty reminiscent of the third bowl in this post.

Though much of the reason this last bowl is so powerful is its glazing, another consideration is that it is the largest of the pieces I brought. With that in mind, I plan to bring mostly large pieces to my next raku workshop.

Which copper glaze bowl is your favorite?

New Ceramics!

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My latest batch of ceramics has come out of the final firing! I started these pieces around three months ago, but ceramics take time and sequential processing. Though there’s still quite a bit of trial and error, I feel that I am honing my glazing skills! There are several glazing combinations from this go-round that I’m definitely going to be revisiting. There is also a new glaze color in this set - Green Tweed - that we didn’t have on hand before; I glazed it blind (meaning I had no samples of it to see how it’d turn out) so I didn’t use it on too many pieces, but it turns out I really like it both solo and in combination with other colors so I’ll be adding into a more regular rotation.

Above you see three new small dishes or bowls. The photography of ceramics is difficult because they are three-dimensional objects with variance - how many photos do I need to share to truly capture enough of each artwork? For these, I think one photo sufficiently captures each piece, though on the one with the hand-painted rings, there are rings on the exterior of the dish as well which I’m not sure is evident. Maybe I should have taken a side photo too?

However, for the small bowl above, I think at least two photos are needed to understand the glazing; another could provide even more coverage, but I believe only one would be insufficient.

All of the eight pieces immediately above are planters with drainage holes, as demonstrated by the final photo in the grid.

For many of the more complexly glazed pieces, I think my photographs - even multiple - don’t fully capture their totality. I should experiment to see if different photo setups can help, but also I think some artwork is always going to be best suited for in-person appreciation!