Sometimes I use a pot as my test piece. I can of course completely wash off the glaze and start again if it’s awful or just not what I wanted. Still I have some time here and there when I’m not in the reach of a piece of pottery to paint on but I do have my watercolors and paper. I find myself sketching little motifs that will hopefully translate well onto pottery.
Sure the colors are going to be different, they just don’t always match up and I don’t necessarily need them too. I do have a tendency to paint a little different once I get a piece of pottery in my hand but the idea is sometimes all I’m looking for. There are the times that it’s a pretty good translation
There are also all the those times that a watercolor just won’t translate. Sometimes you really don’t know how a piece will fit. A flat square watercolor doesn’t always translate onto a shapely mug. Many of my old designs were just smaller motifs that worked with a shapely mug or bowl so now I find myself telling my hands they need to make more “square” feeling items for those designs that just won’t work as well on a sexy mugs with big hips. In those cases when a patterning won’t work, it’s back to the drawing board for either the painting or the pottery shape, or maybe both. I’ll talk more about successes and failures as I continue.
Spunky Eclectic Pottery 