Wednesday, February 15, 2023

MORE PROTOTYPES

Illustrated is a pair of cups and saucers that were made as prototypes for a customer wanting to get a gift for an engineer. After some back and forth and explaining that the final design had to adhere to some principles of gravity and physics, this is what we arrived at. The cups were designed to be rather formal and straight  with a slight curve inward at the top, a tooled foot that is finished with a series of concentric circles and a thumb rest that also has an industrial look to them. The black ink line around the forms was simply used to make sure the handles were placed at exactly the same spot as the expectation was some degree (?) of conformity and unity. The saucers have a depressed area where the cups rest surrounded by concentric channels matching the underside of the cups with the edges finished with a gear like appearance.   

The prototype was accepted and I made a set of eight and only eight cups and saucers that were glazed in a dark green-black matt glaze that I have used in the past for flower pots and serving bowls. I was asked not to use any photos of the finished project but since these are simply greenware I thought this was a least a peek into another small commission and odd project that has come my way. A bit more demanding to make than most pieces due to the +/- exacting dimensions, these were still fun to make as I had never made anything quite like this before and after more than a few years of making pots, odd can sometimes make for a very intriguing day working in the studio.