Grey Otter

In the spirit of making jars in pairs, this is the other half of the pair of river otters I made after the two penguins. Inspired by my favourite otter plushies, I shaped a wide snout divided into three parts with a coffee bean shaped nose on top. To me, the cutest part about otters is their face grooming routine. But this only a popular characteristic of sea otters rather than river otters. In spite of that, I still wanted to make this otter put her paws up to her cheeks to add more personality to the jar.

I spent quite some time painting the border between the grey and white parts of the jar. It distinguishes this jar from another mammal to a river otter and needs to be done right so the snout doesn’t look out of place. For the mouth, I used a very thin brush to paint on lines into the crevices of the snout for a neutral expression. And perhaps one of my favourite parts of the painting was to apply the pink toe beans on the inner side of the paws.

After a dip into clear glaze and a glaze firing, the otter came out slightly fused. When I separated the lid from the jar with some light taps from a wooden pin, its left paw snapped off because some glaze stuck to it from the lid. The right paw was fine because it was set at an angle that would not touch the lid. But the left paw was too thick near the attachment and very close to the lid.

I used the same colour of Amaco Velvet underglaze as the baby blue penguin, Morning Fog, but I was able to make it look like 2 different colours because of the contrast colours applied to the jar. The otter looks grey whereas the penguin looks more blue. Using the dark brown accent colour makes the eye perceive the blue to lean towards a cool grey. And the golden yellow makes the blue look more saturated. It’s interesting how you can perceive different colours with the same jar of paint depending on the entire palette of the jar! And yes, I applied white underglaze here so you can compare the contrast of the tummy with the rest of its body with the baby blue penguin jar.