Earlier this year a lovely customer asked me if I’d consider designing a travel palette. It sounded like a fun challenge and a nice addition to the other items in my line of painting tools.

The theme of the first travel palette I made was a Palm Springs inspired streetscape. We drove through the city after a visit to Joshua Tree National Park.  There were so many cool midcentury modern buildings that finding an appropriate pattern for the wells was easy.

The second design, the sardines, was a response to seeing these little tin cans of fish everywhere. While I must admit I’m not a big fan of the oily little fish, I appreciate that they’re a sustainable way to get one’s omega 3s, hence their popularity.

The third travel palette is my smallest palette yet. I wanted to make another animal palette and the shape of the spider is so efficient for dividing wells that it was an obvious choice. I think it’s an elegant little piece so I wanted to accentuate the form with a touch of gold luster. These mini spider palettes will be available in the fall.

Despite my best intentions, this blog has fallen by the wayside again. Like a lot of people who enjoy making things, I’d rather spend time in the studio than on the computer. That said, I do enjoy looking at this blog as a digital diary so I really want to post more regularly. It’s true that Instagram also serves a similar purpose but this blog goes back so much further than my IG account.

Above are some images from things I’ve created in the past few months.

I had a lot of success with my octopus palette last year. People seemed to really enjoy it and I made quite a few. What’s interesting to me is how durable the round shape is. I sometimes get cracks in my rectangular palettes. It usually happens during the glaze firings and, after all the steps that go into making a palette, it’s very disappointing. Interestingly, I very rarely get cracks with the octopus palettes. Because of this, I was excited to try a couple of additional round designs.

The Ferris wheel was a fun, but challenging, design. Because of all the little car bumps along the perimeter’s edge this one takes a lot of time and patience to trim. For this reason, it’s a palette that I enjoy using more than making.

The whale palette was a design requested by a woman named Cayleena. While I prefer not to do custom designs, sometimes people throw out ideas for things that they’d love to see in my shop. I often sketch these up. If I come up with a sketch I like, it may turn into a tile or palette.

The last images are brush rest designs. The first is the chillin’ chimp. It was just a doodle-inspired design. The second is the turtles on a log brush rest. It was inspired by some photos I took at Green Lake here in Seattle.

Right now I’m in the early stages of a couple of new palette designs. They’re a bit of a departure for me but I’m excited about them. I’ll try to document the process for a future post.

This blog hasn’t been getting a lot of love from me lately but I really want to be better about posting more regularly in 2024. It’s been a creative diary for me for a long time and I enjoy looking at old posts from time to time to bring back memories and revisit ideas.

I’m still designing paint palettes but I took a break from the seasonal palette series to design this Octopus Palette. I’ve been wanting to design another octopus tile for a long time. My original octopus is very “reserved” with his simple figure 8 shape and prayer like pose. This octopus, while contained in a simple circle, is more active than his predecessor. His long expressive arms spread out to create a variety of wells for separating and mixing colors.

The octopus’s two front arms meet to form a heart. A notch beneath the heart provides a place to rest one’s brush.

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything – time for a little recap.

I’ve been spending a lot of time making new paint palettes. After the honey bee and dragonfly palettes, I designed a few simpler ones based on patterns in nature, specifically animal patterns. These patterns were inspired by fish scales, snakeskin, and armadillo bands.

Most recently, I’ve been working on a series of seasonal palettes. First came the “cloud” palette for fall. It features a cluster of interlocking rain clouds hovering over a large rectangular well where an abandoned umbrella sits surrounded by puddles. More recently, I’ve been working on the winter themed “polar bear” palette. It features a bear emerging from a forest of tessellating pine trees as he trudges through the snow.

While I’ve been super busy with these projects, there have been a number of setbacks, mostly due to my aging kiln. I finally bit the bullet and ordered a new one several weeks ago. As I eagerly await its arrival, I’m going to shift gears and spend more time painting. Honestly, not having to think about the technical aspects of ceramics for a little while will be refreshing.

The idea for this palette came from an artist named Mona who asked me to make her a white dragonfly tile because she thought it would work well as a small palette. She was right – it made a really good mini palette because of the negative space surrounding the insect.

I’ve been wanting to design another palette so I sketched some ideas incorporating a pattern of dragonflies. Since it is a relatively large piece, I’ve been experimenting with different types of clay in an effort to minimize the warping often associated with larger tiles. I love the white color of porcelain clay for making palettes because I think it provides a great surface for mixing colors, but I decided to try a couple of stoneware clay bodies too. I was taught that stoneware, especially with sand and grog, is less inclined to warp than porcelain. Surprisingly, I did encounter some warping with one of the stoneware clays as it dried. Fortunately, the palette flattened out during the glaze firing.

I glazed the porcelain palettes with clear glaze and the stoneware palettes with white glaze. The white stoneware palettes provide a white surface for mixing colors but they have a more rustic appearance. The darker clay peaks through the white glaze and accentuates the carved details.

I don’t want October to slip away without posting anything for this month. The Honey Bee palette has been a big seller these past few months so I’ve been in production mode. I’ve made a lot of them to fill orders, as well as, making extras in case the holiday season gets busy. In addition to the palettes, I’ve designed a simple water cup and brush rest to go along with them. Hopefully, I’ll get a few of these poured and glazed in time to list the sets in my Etsy shop by mid November.

As it turns out, Etsy is a great place to sell palettes. The Honey Bee Palette has been a pretty popular item in my shop so I decided to make a small palette based on my turtle tile. The nice feature of this palette is the removable shell that works as a water cup. Soon after making the palette, I began to think of possible video ideas for promoting it on Instagram. I made a quick little stop-motion animation that hasn’t really received much attention in the IG world but I think it’s one of my better posts:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChAU5C8gYao/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=