Inspired by the birds outside my kitchen window who come for their morning meal, I decided to make two bird baths that resembled bird nests. Initially I was only going to make one bird bath but I ended up making two top portions because I didn’t know which one would fit properly. I also didn’t know if the bright blue crackled glass would work on the top of one of the dishes.
The first part of the bird bath that I made was the centre part, the actual bird nest. The challenge for this section was the fact that I had to create the entire nest upside down. This was because wet clay is not structurally strong and so I had to build it as an upside-down bowl resting the weight of the object on the widest part of the nest. This meant I was unsure as to whether the top dish would fit on top of the bird nest and I didn’t have a good idea of the finished product until after it was fired. After the first firing I sponge dipped a thin wash of manganese oxide on the branches to make them look real. The difficult part of covering the uneven surface was getting into each internal nook and cranny with the oxide and I resorted to using a thin paint brush for the hard to reach areas.
The second section I created was the base and for both I decided to make a tree trunk. My goal was to make it as tall as possible and still fit in the kiln, which limited it to 22 inches high. Using a tube for the tree trunk form, I then attached the giant tube to an asymmetrical base and then built the bottom section, so it looked like an actual tree growing out of the earth. Before it dried to leather-hard stage I needed to add texture to the clay so that it looked like bark. This bark effect was achieved by first pressing grooves into the clay that formed lines up and down the trunk along with a few swirly knots. Trees are organic and so the lines shouldn’t be uniform. In order to vary the texture even more, I opened up some grooves wider than others and I added blobs of wet clay randomly on the trunk. The final look is rough uneven bark. After biscuit firing the trunk, I then used a thin wash of manganese oxide to finish the tree trunk. In a very watered-down liquid stage, I made sure that the oxide ran into the grooves and I washed off bits from the raised surfaces. Manganese oxide can stick to kiln shelves in the firing process and so it is important not to build up a thick coating on the part that will be touching the shelf during the firing phase.
The final section of the bird bath is the actual bath that the birds will use. I needed to make something shallow enough for the little birds and something that could be removed from the base in order to be cleaned. I created two tops with two different bird nest looks. The first one turned a brilliant aqua colour while firing due to a chemical reaction between the frosted jade glaze and bits of clear glass that melted down the inside of the dish. The second bird bath top looks more like a traditional nest and includes three bird eggs that can be a place for little birds to sit on while drinking from the bird bath. Looking closely at the eggs one will notice an interesting bubble-style texture on the surface. This effect was achieved by blowing a liquid mixture of washing up liquid, underglaze and
water through a straw across the surface.
I hope these two bird baths bring as much pleasure to someone who is interested in both art and garden birds as they have to me. They are for sale at Obsidian Art Gallery http://www.obsidianart.co.uk/.
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