This semester has certainly been a doozy. I feel like I might fade away. I just finished a piece in clay that likely won’t be fired until next semester (spring 2026). I’ll show progress on that piece and detail all my design decisions that went into it, and I’ll also show my finished kitty piece with a few more progress pictures I hadn’t already shared.

Here’s the final kitty piece, I’m, overall, pretty happy with how the glaze turned out. I’m glad the bag turned out decently realistic. I brushed the bag with iron oxide to get a bit more dimensionality than the plain clay color. I sprayed the cat, and the inside of the bag inadvertently, with white glaze. I then wiped out the overspray that hit the bag, and painted on black underglaze according to my picture reference of my cat. I then sprayed it with a little bit of clear to prevent crawling. I think the final effect works well, although, in retrospect, I almost wish the cat were more matte. Not much I could have done to achieve that, though.

The other thing I want to touch on is this other large work. It’s a gift for a friend, else I probably wouldn’t have considered working on an architectural piece. It’s a temple in remote India, and he wanted it to be an incense burner. I wanted it to have multiple options for types of incense, so there’s a spot inside the larger area so that the smoke comes out the chimney, there’s a spot for a stick at the top of the roof, and then there’s a mechanism in the rock at the back. The rock saved the temple from a mudslide, so I wanted the rock to be able to house a downflowing incense cone so that it flows down the sides of the temple. Hopefully it works 🙂

I started the temple a few weeks ago, and I just finally finished it on Thursday. I honestly wish I had been able to get all the detail in it. I think once it’s glazed, it’ll look really neat. I hope, anyway.

A short post this week, what with preparations for finals and all that, but I hope you enjoyed.

More to come!