First self portrait

This is my first self portrait, I painted it this morning using overglaze paints, now it’s ready to be fired. I may add more later or maybe not.

This is the finished  portrait, as you can see I tweaked it further before firing, once fired the paint is permanent as it binds with the glaze.
Some of the paint in the heavy areas burned out, I expected this to happen, I added some more paint in places and fired again.

I was trying to paint tone using colour so here it is in B&W

Some people are put off by the colour,  people felt that way about the French  Impressionist paintings, they thought the flesh looked like corpses.
Which do you prefer? The B&W one looks more familiar to me for some reason

Siena and San Gimignano

More pictures from my holiday

Italy

I’ve just returned form an inspirational tour of Italy, I’m sure many paintings will follow.

If you want to see some of my photos taken in Venice click below

Some photo’s of Florence

Technique used for ‘Wiltshire trees’

I’ve put together a video showing the technique used for this painting.

Watercolour or not?

I’ve been devoting a great deal of time to developing a method for overglaze painting ( or china painting as it’s often called) that is more akin to watercolours than to traditional china painting methods. I mix my overglaze paints with sugar and water in the wells of my palette, and then use water to paint with as you would with watercolours. As I’m working on a ceramic tile you cannot wet it first like paper, my way around this is to spritz on water allowing the colours to mingle and run.

Wiltshire trees

This painting is on a ceramic tile, it measures 20×30 cm

This is another painting using the same ‘watercolour’ technique for a china painting

Flickr

I’m beginning to find my way around. I’ve added flickr so I can show you what I do all day, now i need to turn up the temperature on my kiln

The magic of warm glass

Today I’m working on a glass dish, warm glass is really magical to work with, especially if you are using art glass and dichroic glass. I also work with recycled glass and turn old glass into dishes and coasters.

This is art glass, it’s iridescent

The glass has been fused, now it’s in the kiln to slump and form a dish

I won’t be able to open the kiln until it has cooled completely, so come back tomorrow to see the finished dish. Sometimes i get up really early to see what’s happened in the kiln, it’s like Christmas morning!!

The first thing i did when i got up this morning was open the kiln, you never know what might have happened, the piece could break or it could go into melt down and form a blob of glass if you over fire it.

So here is the finished dish waiting to find a home from someone who loves hand crafted art glass

Come back soon and I’ll tell you what I do with glass bottles

Hello world!

Hello and welcome to my very first blog entry. My name is Jill Egan, I am an artist/artisan working in watercolours and kiln fired art such as dichroic jewellery and recycled glass items.

This a watercolour commission I was working on yesterday, it’s for an 80th birthday present, I hope he likes it.

It’s sometimes difficult doing commission work as it’s not always a subject I would choose to paint, fortunately I liked this one the challenge was working from a small photograph.

I’ll be posting a variety of pieces that I’m working on so please come back soon