Nothing TERRIBLY exciting, but the weather was nice, traffic wasn't too bad, and the elk were out in ALL the usual elk areas, INCLUDING the MIDDLE OF THE ROAD.....   I've seen them out in the road in that one spot before, so no big shock, although the look on the elk was rather classic....  the elk was looking back over her shoulder at the pick up ahead of me (we were both stopped waiting for her to MOVE) sort of indignantly.  Sure looked like she was surprised to see anything 3 feet behind her!  Almost ad though she was going to turn around and challenge it, but she moved off.  Normally they hang out off the road 40 or 50 feet at least, but for whatever reason today they were right up at the road in 3 different places.  Mind you, this is a 100 mile drive each way, it takes 2 1/2 hours because of the twists n turns n dodging redwoods (and elk!) and  the different herds of elk were 20 or so MILES APART, and in the road in the middle of the day!   Oh, and the slides... several slides, but they're working on them.

The wild plum trees and daffies are blooming (about 3 weeks late!) and some of the leaves are starting to pop!  Of course they're talking about frost tonight, figures huh? 

Anyway, I picked up 300 pounds of clay, a few glazes, and a few other odds n ends.  My pick up drives much nicer with the weight in the back!

I've been asked how I take my photos, so I grabbed the camera off the tripod and took a shot of the set up.  Trust me, it really IS this ugly, but it lets me take pretty good photos!  The two clip lamps are clipped to a piece of 1x2 inch lumber hanging from wires in the overhead.  I don't say ceiling, because, well, its NOT.  At the moment the wires are hanging off a couple of clamps hooked onto the beams supporting my bedroom.  I'm working on my router table (covered with a blue tarp) and using an old sheet of 150lb rough watercolor paper as a background.  Its laying up against whatever is handy (in this photo its a packing box that eventually ended up in Hawaii).  The big thing is I position the two lights so there are no dark spots, and sometimes I raise the camera and shoot down, sometimes I crunch it all the way down to the bench level.  Every different type of piece requires resetting to get the best shot.  Sometimes I pull the lights back and make the light hit more from the front, other times I take one down and hold it in just the right spot.  Its a matter of looking through the camera so I can see what the shot will look like, and optimizing it with the best camera position, best light position, and sometimes even moving the subject to get it all just right.

Here's the shot you see set up above, unedited.  To USE this shot, I adjusted the angle slightly (1 degree clockwise) then cropped it so the subject takes more of the frame.   You can see the final shot here, this one is the center view in the third photo down, the one with 3 views. 

banded pot on Etsy

I didn't have to adjust the levels with this one as I played with the camera settings, but if I forget to do that I usually have to adjust it in the editing phase.   I use full spectrum OTTlite bulbs so the color is good, if you use standard florescent or incandescent bulbs, you might find your color wayyy off.  Incandescent bulbs tend to make your photos look yellow or orange, while florescent bulbs give you an ugly green cast. 

Ok, here they are with the iron oxide over whole thing, purple on the starfish, and fired to completion.  I'm really tickled with how they came out, although I want to do a bit more work on sorting out the purple for those starfish....  that glaze is just shinier than I want.  I've also been working on a technique to make the starfish faster, so these should work out at a reasonable price point by the time I get everything ironed out!

These are something new!  They're decorative plaques, this one has starfish, seaweed, mussels, limpets, and barnacles, the one off to the side is just seaweed, starfish, and the mussel.  This photo shows it as it came out of the bisque firing, the orange starfish have a terra sigillata that will stay pretty much that color, the seaweed has green terra sig, but it will mute down some.  The barnacles will get another coat of stain so it keeps pretty close to that through the next firing.  The bare starfish in the middle will get a thin layer of purple glaze, and the whole thing will have iron oxide over it to pop the details and mute the pastel look.  The fun thing about putting oxide over it when it has terra sig fired on is that the terra sig keeps the oxide from soaking in, so it doesn't get stained nearly as much as the background.

This is a bunch of other stuff waiting for finish here, there's orchid pots, bonsai pots and kusamono pots.  The dark oval bonsai pots to the right will just get stain, the lighter ones to the left get glaze.  Some of the orchid pots will get stain, others glaze, and the kusamonos get some glaze, some stain.  The dark kusamonos will just get iron oxide so they'll look like pieces of tree bark -which is what I used to texture them!