I've recently taken up the art of painting pots. Not creating pots, mind you, that's for my partner in crime. Seems too messy, sloppy, out of control for me. I can just see my piece of clay slipping drunkenly on the potter's wheel, diminishing from an object of elegant beauty to a brown blob of nothingness in thirty seconds or less. Or maybe I just want to paint them.
Not that painting pots is anything to turn your nose skyward. Yesterday's adventure involved drawing a tortoise on the pot. I saw the design on the cover of a Terry Pratchett novel, "Small Gods" and I thought, "Got to get that on to the next creation, and no mistake." (Oick, do I owe the illustrator a fee for artistic plagiarism? Ah that's litigation for another day in another life). So in haste, I drew the said tortoise, or what, to be honest, was the nearest depiction I could muster after two glasses of red wine. After many modifications, including severe adjustment of the tail piece, which originally looked like a fifth leg or worse, a passable tortoise emerged.
The next hurdle was the glaze. The best looking colours yesterday were pink and blue. Ok, who said anything about realism here? All the best tortoises are pink and blue. I was in a bit of a rush at this stage. You know when you get this bright idea, and it seems grand at first but then you feel like "hurry up and finish already"? Well I was like that. So I must admit some of the outer scales looked as if God did not pay too much attention on day seven. However at the end of an hour a very respectably painted tortoise swam into view in the middle of the oval pot. Well especially when you looked kindly from a distance.
Now as to what the heck it looks like when it comes out the kiln, that will have to wait until another day.
