I have indeed been off radar for a few weeks. So what have I been up to? First we drove up to Vienna, Austria to visit some with some friends from my high school and sightsee a bit more before continuing to a village just outside Budapest, Hungary. That was where we attended Symposium 9.0 accompanied by a workshop creating ceramics! Yes ceramics. Always happy to try something new!
Hosted by British ceramics artist, Neil Wolstenholme, who resides with his family in Hungary, we learned quite a bit about ceramic figures and creating them. And how fascinating that was. It has been quite some time since touching clay, dating back to high school so memories of my childhood came flooding back. What makes this artist so special is that he creates quite a few cool ceramic work that create a statement. Hello Kitty figurines is one of them. As such, I began a year ago by buying some of his work, then eventually we became friends.
A suggestion was then made that I go over to his studio in Budoärs, a small village just outside Budapest and attend a week-long workshop. This coincided with the annual Symposium 9.0 so I had the chance to meet and greet some other ceramic artists and students studying under him. And so the first day upon our arrival on Monday afternoon, we were shown how his “mass produced” ceramic figures are made using a plaster mold. That was amazing. Then the next few days, I ended up painting three bespoke Hello Kitty figures: Flower Power Kitty (above pic), Toyota Supra Kitty (below left) and of course Classic Kitty (right)!
In between letting the clay or paint dry, I worked on other projects too. Painting with cobalt ink six sets each of tall and short cups, bowls and tiles. And I wanted to make this special and kawaii of course. Each piece was unique and doodled on intuitively, whatever came to mind. No initial pencil sketches. Just paint it all on directly. It was quite a challenge too painting with Chinese calligraphy brushes but I managed; as a child growing up in Japan, I was made to attend calligraphy classes using sumié ink and the brushes. So nothing too new for me. But this time funner!
And apart from painting kawaii characters like Little One on the pieces, I even created a ceramic piece of her! Here we created the figure from scratch using a variety of clays and building her up by rolling up the clay and piling each piece one on top of the other, layer by layer till you eventually end up with a cylinder. A separate one was then made for the head, and then we worked on the hair. Once dry, I painted the eyes before she hit the kiln.
The workshop concluded with three Hello Kitty figures, one Little One and 24 pieces of ceramic cups, bowls and tiles. Plus my boyfriend ended up with four amazing clay models of his yellow Toyota Supra! How sweet he decided to also have some fun at the workshop. And very considerate and kind of Neil to take him into account as well! In fact, what a wonderful teacher he was. Very informative and patient, methodically taking us step by step during the process. Plus we had the chance to check out the kiln and see how it’s all done! I will be describing more about each set of items I made in detail during the next few weeks. Otherwise we’d will end up with epic proportions of writing here! So keep your eyes peeled…
Please click here to find out more about Neil Wolstenholme and his amazing work!
My Kawaii Quarter 