Cow

One of the most defining features for my animal jars is the shape and angle of the ears. Before starting on a piece, I’d study pictures of real life cows from all different angles so that I could translate that shape onto the jar. I always try to strike a balance between how cartoonish and realistic the animal looks. I’ve realized that with my style, I tend to make the ears a lot more realistic than the snout.

The cow and pig snouts are so similar that I tried to distinguish the two by making the cow’s nose larger and more rectangular. I also got a new pink underglaze that is more vibrant than the one I used for the pig. As always, painting on the irregularly shaped blobs was a joy. I was conscious of using brown instead of black spots because I wanted one blob to overlap with an eye. Since I paint a simple black dot for the eye, the cow would be missing an eye with that design.

Painting is often the most time consuming step in my process because each design needs to use three even coats of underglaze without any overlap between different colours. This is the first jar to use porcelain instead of bmix clay because Porcelain fires into a white colour whereas bmix fires into a beige colour. I used the same painting technique on the cat which uses bmix clay for comparison. I was so happy with how the bright white porcelain contrasted with the underglazed cow features here.