Conference Workshops

At the Art Clay Conference there were workshops over three days. On the first two days I did workshops with Ryota and Dice who had flown over from Japan especially for the conference. Aida Chemicals who make Art Clay had kindly sent them over and also supplied all of the Art Clay that we used at the conference. Fantastic support and everyone was very grateful.

Ryota is a master Art Clay Instructor who teaches and helps plan the new projects in Japan. Dice is head of the Oversea Division and also provided valuable translation as Ryota does not speak much English.

On the Thursday the workshop covered making pieces to create a Mokume Gane type effect by texturing using cuttlefish bone and plating pieces in copper which was then polished back to varying degrees depending on taste.

Here is a (very poor!) photo of the group work.

Ryota demonstrating the technique

and these are the pieces I made.

On the Friday I did the Resin workshop with Ryota and Dice. As an enameller I was a little dubious about how much I would like this as usually when I have used resins before I have soon realised I could do it quicker in enamel!

This technique was to make a raised domed area which really is not something that you could achieve in enamel to have any strength.

I really enjoyed this workshop and it is definitely a technique that I will use again. The colours are hollow domes and look lovely. I was very pleased with the result.

Here is a photo of all the pieces made by everyone in our group

Mine is the rather startling orange one at the top (well it would be wouldn't it ;-) ) and you can see a larger photo of my piece at the start of this post.

On the Saturday I taught an enamelling workshop with my good friend Lynne Glazzard. We combined her paper texture techique with my enamelled accents and we had a fun day. Unfortunately neither of us remembered to take any photos all day!!

Here is a photo of some of the pieces from the show and tell the next day, but unfortunately quite a few people had to leave early so quite a bit of the group work is missing.

Still it gives you an idea of what we were up to.

I also managed a bit of sightseeing and have some nice photos in York Minster to post next...