We are well into the first week of September – Summer, for all intensive purposes, is over. I had a great Summer, as usual, filled with traveling and family. Dante traveled with us on most of our trips – it’s so nice having him along.
There was some work going on behind the scenes at Shepherd Grove, even with all of the summer fun, though little had to do with the hands-on making of my stoneware pottery. Most of the work was of the design nature and had to do with adding new dog breed designs to my line up. For this I enlisted the help of a wonderful artist named Kathy Stieter to do some of the preliminary sketches and I did some too.
The design work has several stages. First, a sketch is done, then it is cleaned up. It gets painted and made into a decal with my ceramic decal printer. Then test firing is done on glazed tiles to make sure the colors turn out well on the finished piece. I love the process of taking my ideas and making them into my finished dog themed pottery. And my printer is awesome. The quality and durability of the artwork decal is amazing once it has been fired.
At this point, I have many dog sketches, several of which have been finalized and a few of which have been painted. This week I will attempt to finalize all the sketches and painting as many as I can. I’m very excited about these new doggies – many have been requested by folks on the Shepherds Grove Facebook Page.
I hope all of you are transitioning well into Fall. I just feels like the right place to be and hope that’s the case for you too.
Shepherd's Grove Studio 