Ideas & Designs

Ideas

After gathering my idea of a modern day Caribbean Eve, my idea was to set her in the rainforest surrounded by plants, like in the reference print by Durer.

These were my first sketches of my idea.

The first idea's were centred around my Eve and parrot being in the rainforest, like I was capturing a moment. My main concerns with this idea was re creating it on ceramics, I wasn't sure if I was designing something with too much detail that it would take forever to create.

That's why when I continued designing I started simplifying the designs with less detail and the addition of a background colour. These worked better and once I made my first test of designs on my ceramics, I found layering between stamping, sgraffito and 3d plants allowed me to create the detail I wanted without it being to complicated or time consuming.

Forms

Now that I had a basic idea of designs I looked to figure out the forms I was going to use. I wanted to keep the forms 'flat' as they were going to be more decorative pieces and it was easier to work flat on something I had never attempted before. I started with 3 main forms oval, large round plate and small round dish. But after my first test I decided to embrace a more ergonomic shape to some of my pieces and keep the edges of them more natural that perfect. Nerveless when it came to designing it was easier to do so now that I had the forms figured out.

Designs

Because I was working with white clay and a lot of green colours I wanted to make sure I could still have my injection of colour that I like to use in my work. Therefore I decided to go with adding a colour in the backgrounds to emphasise the 'scene'.

I had a few other design ideas along the way, some I kept to actually try out and some I didn't. I tried creating a sort of repeat cluster of plants along a background colour. I made a repeat stamp background (which I went through with and created) and a few others that are in my sketchbooks. But most of all I stuck mostly to my original idea and I'm really happy with the results.

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