Running behind, as usual

These are the lottery horses as they looked right before I left for Boise two weeks ago. They don't look much like this anymore - everyone is much darker now - but they aren't yet finished. Soon, though!

It's hard to tell with so many of them at a rather pale stage in the photo (and with the camera flash making them even more so), but so far the plan has:
a Finn in a "red silverish" sabino
an Al-Hadiye in dapple rose grey (started out life chestnut)
a Maggie in dark dapple grey
an Eira foal in blue sabino roan
and a Pixie in bay fewspot

Oh, for more hours in the day. Or perhaps some better time management skills!

Unexpected

Taking a break from shiny pony making to don my horse color geek hat...

I found this guy last night. He's a Dutch Heavy Draft, which is a breed where frosty roans are really common. (That's the color of his dam there in the picture.) I certainly wasn't looking for - or remotely expecting - this color. To my knowledge, the only dilute found in the heavy European draft breeds is silver. That dilute is pretty common in the Breton and the Comtois, and is occasionally seen in Brabants and some of their relatives. Certainly nothing like this blue-eyed, pink-skinned taupe fellow!

My first guess would be that he is the "new" pearl dilute. This foal has a bay sire and a bay roan dam, and pearl is a recessive. Previously that color had been identified in Paints (where it has been referred to as the "Barlink factor") and in the Iberian breeds, but more recently it has been confirmed in Gypsy horses. Finding it in one of the European heavies would be really unexpected. At least there is a test for pearl, though, so hopefully his owners will have him tested.

(Oh, and click on the photo for a really huge version of the picture.)

Mayhem!

If there is one thing I look forward to each year, it's Mayhem. That's when I spend a week in Boise with fellow ceramic artists Sarah Minkiewicz, Joan Berkwitz and Lynn Fraley. It's a week set aside for sharing ideas, learning new techniques and just generally being inspired. (Well, that and consume an insane amount of food.)

It has become our tradition to undertake a big project for the week. This year we had something particularly ambitious in mind. It began with an innocent enough question at last year's gathering. Sarah wanted to know if Joan could mold her traditional sculpture Stormwatch in ceramic. His complex, swirling mane and tail would have been daunting enough, but he was also a scale not usually done in earthenware. (Plaster molds absorb the water from the casting slip, and large horses require molds that are too heavy to tip and drain once they are wet.) But the idea of seeing him in ceramic was too tempting, and Joan agreed to try.

And even now, after spending a week working on one, it's hard to believe she did it. The nineteen-piece mold is an amazing bit of engineering. I have often wondered if anyone else is making complex plaster molds like these - for any application.

Anyway, at this point I'll just share some photos I took during the week.



Here is Sarah de-molding a Stormwatch. Once he comes out of the mold, he takes over six hours to clean and assemble. I should also point out that this a really rare in-focus photo of Sarah. These are typical photos of Sarah.



She is never still! I used to think I was a high-energy, bouncy sort of person. But I am just not in the same league. My camera could not cope.



No, we didn't render Joan down to make slip! Most of us who make earthenware horses use Joan's slip recipe, which is itself close to the original Hagen-Renaker slip recipe. I suspect that after staying up until all hours for days, Joan might say it was the only thing still fresh!



And here is Joan, doing what we both did all week - scritching little roan hairs in with an xacto blade. All I can say is there are a lot of square inches on a traditional scale horse!



And here is Lynn, bringing us a box. We got so excited when she arrived, because we thought she had said she brought us brownies. (We had just spent the previous night at her home, enjoying her cooking, so we had good reason to be happy about this.)



What she had said was that she brought Brownie, not brownies. We were all terribly disappointed - all out of proportion to how hungry we could have possibly been at that point. Mayhem has a way of making food seem really important. (Maybe to balance out how unimportant sleep becomes!)



Here is Sarah's enormous kiln ("Big Al") loaded up for a bisque fire. You can see the two Stormys and Sarah's two plaques, as well as an assortment of greenware. I believe this was the last bisque firing for these pieces before the glazing fire.

You can see the finished Storms here. And you can see Sarah's plaques here. I have more things to post - it was a busy week - but I fear this is already a long post to slog through so I'll save them for another time.

12,226

That's how many horse color images were on my hard drive. Or perhaps I should say that is how many I found and organized. I don't doubt there are more scattered across the various half-working laptops, thumb drives and disks here at the house. Or, for that matter, hiding in this or that unrelated folder ("Taxes/Kathman family/2005") because I didn't realize I had a new directory default when I saved the photo.

But it's a start! I promised myself that I would do this so I could more easily share my research while I was in Boise for Mayhem. I knew I had a lot of photos, but I never guessed there were more than 12,000 of them. Or that setting them up in folders by breed and then by color or pattern would be quite so difficult. ("Oh, hey... now what is this chestnut generic-looking guy in this photo and why was it that I saved him? And couldn't I have titled the file something more revealing than Carries_the_Gene?")

And as the deadline for my trip loomed, the project just took over. So this blog was awfully silent, and my family forgot what home-cooked meals tasted like. And then I left for Boise!

I am home again, though, and busy catching up on all that was dropped in my absence. I have lots of fun things to share from Mayhem, although the project we actually gathered for there will have to wait for Sarah's announcement. (It's really cool.) But I hope to post some fun pictures that don't give it all away sometime later today or tomorrow.

And if for some reason I promised you a picture of a brindle Noriker or a tobiano Fjord, it's a lot more likely that I can actually find it.

More Lirico work

Today was spent ticking the sabino Lirico. In this picture I've put down some warm gray (eventually it will be a darker charcoal color) and have started the hair texture on areas of his neck, flank and hip. I tend to move around a fair bit like this, working in one area and then switching to another, so the piece looks more consistent in the end. By the end of the day I had one side done. Tomorrow I'll tackle the other. After all his hair detail is fired on, I'll start deepening his coloring and softening the effect of the ticking.

I had hoped to fire the appaloosa Lirico in the kiln with him, but I bent my last airbrush needle. (Obviously inventory control here at the studio leaves something to be desired!) Hopefully replacements will arrive in the next day or so and I can get him caught back up with his buddy. For the moment he just looks like an odd pink-skinned white horse with a dirty mane and a dark tail.

Purple Mummified Ponies

Can't you hear them? "No! Don't leave us like this!!" And they would have a reason to worry, since I've left them encased in bubble wrap for years now.

When this piece was produced by Marcherware, I was asked to produce four pieces as a guest artist. The pieces were to go to caster (Mark Farmer), the finisher (Joan Berkwitz), the sculptor (Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig), and myself. Since the other customs were done in groups of three, these would be the only one-of-a-kinds from the run.

I finished one, a pale silver dapple, fairly early on. (Early is a relative term with me.) But the other three have been here waiting while I fell into the trap of believing that they would never look as good with a current-day glazing as they might in some future "when-I-know-even-more" glaze. It's a really bad habit. I've been working with underglaze for ten years now, and the detail and finesse we can achieve now is amazing compared to what we could do then. What if I later saw these guys and thought, "if only I had known how to..."? Like I said, bad habit.

I decided it was time to get off the fence and glaze these guys. Even a someday-surpassed finish is better than three identically white horses. Besides, if I worked hard, I could finish them in time to hand deliver them to Joan and Sarah when I saw them in Boise!



Here they are with their hooves, manes and tails painted. The hooves were already painted when they got mummified. I always do those first so I can be sure I have a painted "canvas" to detail later. I've picked out some complex patterns for each, so they are going to get a lot of what I think of as "preparation" firings. Those are firings of bits that need a color or some basic shading down so I can add things on top.

I also plan to take full advantage of the fact that, unlike with earthenware, underglaze on bone china is impervious. I can scrape it, mask over top, or even wipe paint off from it, all without causing any damage.



The first guy with the dark mane and tail will be loosely based on this guy, Pusher's Coat of Colors. (Check out the link for lots more really neat pictures of him. He's always been a favorite of mine.) I want to try some new tricks with getting softer, more true-to-scale roaning on him. I also wanted to go a bit darker with him than I have done on some of my previous sabino roans.



And this is Pratt Sully Fire. I had chosen him as the reference for Sarah's Lirico back when I first got the bisques. I have always loved the idea of leopard-patterned Spanish horses.

My original thinking was to tone down the "loud" in his pattern by making his base color champagne. This would also give me a chance to do some greenish eyes. Yet when I pulled up Sully's site, I found more recent pictures of him, including the one above. I really liked the effect of his stained, but mostly pale, mane against his darker pattern. Adding this to a light base color wouldn't have the same effect, so I opted to go with a warm chocolate black instead. This would not only let me play with some staining on the mane, but also on the haloing of the spots.



Here is a close up of the initial mane tones. Eventually I'll go back in and add some silvery-chocolate streaks for accuracy (a leopard that loud shouldn't have an all-white mane) and interest. But this kind of coloring really plays up the detail Sarah put in his mane.

These guys are back in the kiln, this time with their pink areas done. I'll post again when I get to the next step, and it will make sense why the pink needed to go on at this stage.

A new Spinnaker

I pulled this little guy, "Phoenix", from the kiln this morning. He was done as a donation for the Realistic Equine Sculpture Society. I suppose you could say he's the product of three donations, since Sarah sculpted Spinnaker for the organization, and then Addi produced him in ceramic for them. I am not sure what plans they have for this guy, but I'm happy he can be a part of the rebirth of the group.