Greetings from Philadelphia

[Garth Herrick]

Heidi,

I forgot my own method of smoothing. Now I remember: I made a grog free slip from some of the clay and carefully painted it on layer by layer with my best sable oil painting brushes. This I tooled and rubbed with some water until some grog began to surface. Then I would let it set up and dry more and repeat the process until it all looked sufficiently cohesive. I spent a lot of time doing this. The more I refined, the more I found that needed further refinement.

I'm a painter, so naturally I found a painting approach to sculpting. I used all types of paint brushes and found brushing around the clay to be very effective for rapidly cleaning up rough modelling. This was especially true for the ears, nose, and mouth, etc. The ears just appeared like magic, just as if I were modelling paint on a canvas portrait.

Finally the deadline came up, and I had to keep it in a toasty warm place to fully dry for several days. It was at that time when the brown clay fully dried to a light gray, that I took all the photographs. It was fired the next day.

Garth