Ceramic Sculpture

>>3105729
i did try and make one, it didn't work very well, couldn't get it hot enough, i was trying to work up to lost-wax bronze casting, but i assume i would burn myself alive somehow after the poverty kiln sucked.

>>3105729
I might know more about kilns and ceramics than anyone else who semi-actively posts on this board. Are you looking for advice? Camaraderie?

>>3105776
are you the guy who did those like tiles with pictures of girls on them and some weird piece of filth?

>>3105779
No, but I tried to advise him on making perfectly flat, translucent porcelain panels for drawing on since I have a lot of experience with ultra thin slabs. I don't think he listened to me though.

Supposedly, those were melted animal penis bones, although I am skeptical since bones don't usually fully vitrify when fired like that. The bones I have fired turn to an ashy yellow-green glass with white, chalky remnants surrounded by a halo of orange from the salts locally fluxing the silica in the clay as they evaporate in the heat. Those ones in the photos were brown/black glassy blobs, that looked suspiciously like iron-rich low temp pyrometric cones do when fired above cone 6. But who knows? I'm not an expert on animal penis bones.

>>3105776
I was looking for some advice on how to go about building a kiln at home a while back. Wood burning kiln specifically. Details like what kind of ground is fine to build it on like dirt, stone or gravel. Or would it need a real foundation depending on how big the kiln would be.

That kind of stuff.

>>3105787
yeah i didn't want to say they were penis bones or whatever because they didn't look right to me either. creepy art though, though i've only ever made porcelain bowls and light-relief and stuff in art school, never could really get into fluxes and all that, barely even used glazes.

>>3105811
Firing with wood is a lot of work. You could be stoking for over 14 hours on a kiln with a refrigerator sized stacking space. For this reason, a good many wood kilns out there are multi-chambered climbing kilns built on the slope of a hillside, where the stoking of the bottom chamber partially heats the next higher one to pool the efforts of 3 or more potters. You can get very similar results by firing off LP or natural gas burners for heat and throwing wood into the burner ports periodically. Just be sure to put down some replaceable fired slabs or shit shelves as a liner on the floor of the ports so you don't have to rebuild often. Obviously, the firebox on a dedicated wood kiln isn't as hard to rebuild as the floor of the inner chamber.

Buuut, if you're doing a single chamber, you can pretty much just dig into the ground and lay a 3-6" bed of gravel for drainage, then level it and put a layer of concrete cinderblocks as the base. On top of that goes the first layer of hard firebrick, then the soft firebrick. Don't pick a low spot where water pools. There are a bunch of photos online of people doing these. Yeah, you can always pour a slab, but you don't have to.

>>3105834
I liked that guy's stuff. Since I've never been in possession of any penis bones to fire in a kiln, I can't say they weren't.

The chemistry is such a pain in the ass, that you'll almost always find people fall into two camps: form people with like 5 surfaces (or commercial glazes), and surface people who can master any glaze/surface but have like 5 forms over and over.

>>3105838
That is a lot of useful advice man, thanks.

>>3105729
are there any completed sculptures of the human muscle anatomy like this one?

>>3106312
I'm sure a google search will most likely show that kind of info. That is how I got the OP image. I did not want to post my own shitty work. The best I have is a mock greek face-water jug I did for ceramics class years ago.

>>3106312
ecorche, like the filename

>>3106254
I remembered I had thought of something else right after I posted that crap. Another consideration with firing solely from wood is your chimney is going to have to be 2-3x the height of the kiln in order to establish enough draft to pull the fire up into the kiln. That adds up to a lot of brick; it's almost twice as much materials as a basic arched cube or catenary arch fired with bottled propane or natural gas, which only need a chimney as high as the chamber using the gas pressure for draft. You just gotta think about what fuel is the cheapest for you where you are, and that's the type of kiln you build. Exceptions being things like local codes, whether or not you're rich enough to eat the costs of something niche, etc.

I have a second piece of advice concerning kiln size. Build it around the size of the kiln shelves you have.

>>3105729
I've worked with wax for a long time, since I took a course in lost-wax casting in bronze in college. I find it to be the best medium for me, because of the high level of detail and polish you can get from it. Sculpty has it's place, I use it occasionally to work out a problem with a complex form, but I don't like it as a final-piece medium. I want to try the resin clays out there, like Feeny uses, because it can be worked like clay, but dries to a hardness that can be polished and textured and detailed like nothing else.

A home kiln is dangerous. Find a local co-op or college that allows use of their kiln.

Bumping thread with knowledge.
Late summer is a good time of year to look for deals on used electric kilns since people are trying to clear out their garages. For tall sculpture, especially figurative work this is a boon because you can stack the wired ring segments of two or more of those top-loading kilns of the same diameter to make a superkiln that will fit them without you having to section the sculpture prior to firing. Fires much more evenly top to bottom than fuel-burning kilns do. You can even double up the two sets of lid and floor slabs for ultra electricity efficiency.

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Bump in asking on other ceramic sculptors on what kind of glaze they bother using on most of their sculptures.

I recently discovered an old gas kiln on the property of a friend's house. This would probably be quite the task to restore/get in working order I imagine, as it hasn't seen use in quite some time.
There's also nearby a wheel with a literal wheel at the base of it. How does this work? Is it 'manual'? Could this wheel be restored to working order?

>>3109957
Post some photos and I can tell you what I think. Yeah, that's a kick wheel. Post photos of that, too.

File: Kiln.jpg (1MB, 2992x2216px) Image search: [Google]

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>>3109966
Lousy picture. Not sure why I didn't think to take a better one, I will next time I'm there.

>>3109975
Oh right, and it's outside.

No pics of wheel, but it'd been outside for who knows how long. Bottom wheel was maybe stuck?

>>3109975
That doesn't look too bad. Get some photos of the gas lines, regulators and burners, as well as a couple of the interior (especially the burner ports and arch).

>>3109976
Take it apart, sand off the rust, oil it and all that jazz. Sounds like a fun project to me. You realize this shit is worth a small fortune, right? Fix it up and start using it!

>>3109997
>You realize this shit is worth a small fortune, right?

No shit? Damn I'm gonna have to look into this.
Thanks!

>>3110007
Your friend could probably sell the kiln as is to a potter/sculptor for $3-6k. The real value is in actually using it though. A potter with 5+ years of experience would be able to earn $30-70k/year firing his work in it. Meanwhile, if you were to affiliate yourself with local potters or a sculpture/ceramics teaching facility and rent out firings to them you could charge $100-300 per load. A couple of these a month would cover all your utilities and most of your materials for your own work. Start checking out what's available in your area and see if there's a viable business niche for you. Don't get me wrong, it's actual work, but it's worthwhile work, imo.

>>3110722
I just started up school again full time, but, I'm interested in this project/making some dough off it. Worst case scenario is I fix up the kick wheel, but don't get the kiln running/it doesn't see work.

Thanks for the advice anon.

>>3109631
Don't use glaze. It looks like garbage. You can use various types of wax. I use shoe polish. You can brush it on lightly and spread it with a cloth and burnish it with a piece of leather. You can also used wax applied in a similar way. With wax you can add small amounts of oil paint to get some color.

>>3112962
also as opposed to glaze, if you don't like the shoe polish >>3112962
/wax just refire it it's gone.

>>3109631
I have a few gallon sized jugs of some metallic cone 4-6 commercial glazes. They have alluring names like Gold Rain and Old Gold or something. I think they're pretty expensive, though they were given to me a while ago by someone who didn't want them. Considering fleshing out a project around them.

>>3112962
What kind of clay bodies are you doing this surface on? Is it fired to maturity? If not, do you worry about less durability over time?

>>3112962
I have not heard of that. That sounds like a good idea.

>>3105729

you could always just get the bricks and build a kiln.

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>>3105729

>firing sculptures in a kiln risking them exploding and only getting a single finished piece
>not learning advanced moldmaking and making/selling multiple castings of each sculpture

Unless you're specifically doing pottery, learn moldmaking. There's a video for basic moldmaking from Mark Alfrey and I'm sure there's more advanced moldmaking videos you can get from Stan Winston School.