making an impossible ceramic sculpture 

You are so good. Persistence always pays off. Pottery is a craft. Some potters turn it into art. You are an artist.

you’ve just made me appreciate my (purchased) porcelain night light SO much more. it was a gift when i was little so i never thought much of it until now i actually do ceramics

one time in high school our kiln malfunctioned, melted/misshaped everyone’s pieces and turned them into a plasticky-glass-like substance. I still have a piece from that batch - it was supposed to be a mug, I jokingly call it the gravy boat now

Try this: Make the base part with the gray clay, let it dry, then pour in white porcelain slip to create an inner layer. When carving afterwards, you get a color indication for when you've carved almost all the way through.

Beautiful! I imagine if this becomes more popular, one day this beauty you’ve brought into the world could be a standard seen in lanterns used for festivals of light - rather than the plastic direction they’re going in, imagine how beautiful this would be adorning doorsteps ✨

well crikey.. that was nerve-wracking in parts but inspiring throughout.. you must have been so chuffed with the final pot :) .. its 6.30am and this was quite a start to my day.. thanks for the video.. liked and subbed :)

Its such a triumph to finally see the end results! I'm so happy to see your dedication here.

I have saved this to my “art” playlist. This was absolutely beautiful. But this is the artist’s journey: There are epiphanies and breakthroughs, troughs and peaks. Never let success haunt you: Remember that those successes aren’t what makes you, but you were what made the successes.

As you know there has been a lot of work to make slip casting porcelain translucent and a really neat technique to make it even thinner than traditional slip casting is normally able to achieve is using is very tiny nylon fibres mixed into the slip. Creating a composite material almost like fibreglass, I’ve yet to try this method but there are plenty of journals and articles about it plus I was tipped off on it by a professor of ceramics at my university. I wonder if you could use that on the wheel to add strength and make the whole thing thinner so the carving is less dicy as well as lessen the warping in the kiln. I’ve not worked with porcelain much and never on the wheel (it’s not my specialty) but I do work in hand sculpture a lot and slip casting a little. So maybe if you are feeling like delving into translucence some more but don’t want to deal as much with porcelain’s melodramatic nature (I love porcelain but heavens it’s like a toddler throwing a tantrum sometimes) you might experiment with nylon or other fibres, as things like cotton burn off in the kiln unlike nylon. I also learned that that it’s much easier to achieve this translucency if you fire the porcelain unglazed. I actually find the ivory white warmth of unglazed porcelain really beautiful but it’s not for everyone and you do lose a lot of the gloss that comes with glazed porcelain admittedly. And incase my tone came off wrong I’m not trying to lecture you I just get really excited about ceramics particularly when people are working in the “path less traveled” and I feel compelled to share any knowledge I’ve pick up over the years. So if the tone comes off haughty just imagine it more like an over excited golden retriever. Very cool work, keep making awesome things with ceramics!! It’s such an amazing and ancient technology that people really don’t appreciate enough especially when one has enough skill to really make it sing or in your case shine

If you decide to pursue this further, you might find water engraving to be a good option. Beautiful work so far.

WOW! What an accomplishment! I'm so glad you didn't give up. :)

Is this how rice grain tea cups are made I hade a few and I loved loved loved them! Unfortunately a few boxes never made it home after it left with the moving company I’m so so so happy you made this video thank you! I loved those cups but omg I love love love this! Thank you 🙏🏻

I love pottery. Such an ancient and lasting medium to work with. I dug up and filtered a batch of natural clay from my backyard when I was a kid, and Im teaching it to my kids now. We have an outdoor firepit that I will use as a platform for our makeshift kiln once we make something we want to keep.

Dang they really just assumed you were done like that. I'd be so mad. You have much more patience than me, and so much skill as well! It looks amazing!

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="83">1:23</a> A smash and a yell. At 2x speed, it sounds like the noise for throwing potion bottles in Minecraft.

Fun project details, I really liked learning about your tests and the final product. You have a lot of skills to create great things!

all of the pieces are stunning! so cool to watch your process!

Thank you for sharing your vision and thoughts on your processes. Congratulations on achieving your goal. The result is exquisite!!

absolutely stunning!

WOOOO!! i was so excited to see this video in my feed. congrats on making it work, it looks lovely!!!

Beautiful! thank you for posting. I love this

Beautiful, thanks for sharing this journey with us!

Absolutely amazing! I love listening to your process

Wow, amazing! 😱🎉 incredible how you have to go by intuition alone on how thin the petals are. Awesome work 🙌🏼

Stunning!!!!

Beautiful!

Was mesmerised by the process while finishing off my crochet project at the same time. Amazing work, made me want to get back to sculpting & pottery!

such a great and inspiring process to watch!

Gorgeous!

Beautiful work. Thank you for sharing.

this is absolutely gorgeous

Congratulaciones to your accomplishment! Bravo!

I happened across your video randomly and I've got to say that is some brilliant work! Beautiful and such perseverance too. Keep up the good work! ❤

Congratulations! This is so cool

Beautiful results! I so admire your persistence- love clay, ginkos and delicate celadon porcelains. When I was a child I remember my grandmother had some bowls with a translucent rice grain pattern that seemed extremely special and made a great impression on me. I'm thinking when you were finally able to make the clay do what you wanted, the glaze helped "hold it together". I wish I was still working with clay- I always prefer doing the types of art where I have my hands directly in contact with the materials.

Beautiful. ❤

This is so amazing 🥲

Amazing, absolutely beautiful! Congratulations, that was a hard thing to pull off.

This is amazing. What a good piece of work! So detailed and softly made. Incredible. Love to watch master work. If I had a chance I would even buy this work. This is so beautiful

That's beautiful!

Victory! Congratulations, it’s gorgeous and you are one heck of an artist. of course, I thought that if a tea light wasn’t bright enough to show through, a small LED could be the way to go. They are much brighter, and in some situations, preferable. You don’t have to worry about leaving fire unattended that way.

That is stunning! So glad you stuck with it....failed your way to success! Kudos!

Que projeto magnífico ❤

Incredible piece! This is the type of stuff you could do a PhD thesis on

😊😊😊 LINDO...lindo....perfeito...você é incrível! Adoro a transparência! Amei...obrigada. Do Brasil 🇧🇷 São Paulo ❤

You did a great job at keeping the thickness of the porcelain even on that last one! Maybe in the future try a coil of wadding on the inside to keep the piece up high enough to allow the celadon to drip off onto the shelf, or carve a place that will catch the runoff and pool at the bottom of the lamp. That way you won't get a big flat drip at the bottom like you have in one spot. You did great though! Making your porcelain thin enough to go translucent isn't easy! Oh! Also, try Frost porcelain by Laguna if you haven't yet. It makes the job so much easier!

You have a lot of patience. I would give up trying to do it behind a potter's wheel and try another way, like casting into plaster molds.

How stunning! I have a little set of Chinese bowls and spoons that I found in a charity shop, and I only realised once I got them home that they have translucent dots that glow when you hold them up to the light. I don't know for sure how it was done, but I think they may be thin areas like on your piece. I knew that ceramic vitrifies at higher temperatures, but I never added up what that meant, that translucent porcelain is a kind of glass.

Your pottery style and pieces are admirable. I'm not at your level in terms of pottery skills. When I make larger pieces, I always use a torch; it helps a lot to reduce the wall thickness. I look forward to more videos from you. Best regards, Bernhard from Austria"

Ha! I have too been doing this exact same thing as I also make candles and wanted to make my own vessels that glow the images with the light 🫠

🎉 congratulations Janice 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 I've only just found your channel and I've got to say it is binge worthy! New subbie! Thanks for sharing your journey so far as I'm just beginning mine; and promptly shattered my shoulder (saved my life, but that is another story 😊) so I cannot do anything major in my clay work but I am enjoying learning so much via YTU 😂 🎨 Art'On 🎨 Ange

That's amazing! Also, the work on that second one wasn't wasted: you could just put a string of LED lights inside of it.

Очень красиво!!!!

We have these noodle bowls from the chinese general store and they have these rice shaped translucent spots in it :3 the effects arent very large though so it might have been easier than doing what you're trying to accomplish

Ceramic molding, slip casting will be a better way. You can make much thinner pieces.

Amazing. And you could make a tool to mesure the thickness of your walls for better repeatability. 👍

Our bone china plates were damn near translucent when I was a kid.

Amazing final result! Have you looked at the mutton fat jade porcelain teaware coming out of Dehua? I assume they make it from a mold as you mention to be able to manufacter it, but it's unglazed and very translucent to the point I can the level and color of tea in some peices.

I live for this kind of experimentation to reach an idea that we had at some point. It was awesome to watch. A comment I have to make though. I didn't notice the subtitles until 70% through the video... Then they became a glaring distraction. I think they're better left in the captions tool instead of absolutely baked into the video.

The problem is the porcelain and the firing temperature. It doesn't sound like you have much control over thosse two factors since it is not your studio. But look up "Mutton Fat Porcelain". Porcelain doesn't have to be super thin in order to be translucent.

I wonder if you could make a hooded lantern type piece and polish/facet the insides to direct light from a flame.

would it work if you d made the leaves as extremely thin as possible and then fill them with transparent glaze? so that it might make the paper thin leaves more stronger but still translucent

im just curious if you could test the light passage thru the porcelain with a phone light before firing if that would give you any helpful indicator of the thinnness

❤❤

Would it help at all to have a cylinder inside the jar while carving so that you are less likely to rupture while carving?

the long feedback cycle must be so painful! Idk if any of these ideas would work, but figured I'd suggest them in case they end up being useful for checking thickness while you still have a chance to adjust: 1. IDK if this is the proper term, but I think they're called "inside/outside calipers"? like the calipers that kinda reach out and around before coming together again, seem like they would be perfect for measuring wall thickness (EDIT: looks like the term "yankee calipers" is used a lot for them) 2. so, a flashlight can't shine through the unfired clay, but what if you just added more power? if you got one of those terrifying 100,000 lumen flashlights, maybe u could get a faint glow, just enough to get a sense of how close you are? I'm guessing you would need to just briefly flash the light now and then so as to not heat up the workpiece 3. I guess you'd need to get pretty quick at this for this to be useful, but i wonder how accurately a handheld 3D scanner could capture a work in progress? If you can get decent accuracy, you could then cut it in half in software and measure how much thickness is left.They

😮🤯👍

wadding can allow for less warping

It looks very like lithophane. Maybe you can mould it, but I have 0 experience into clay or porcelain. If you are interested you may look more into it :)

Check plus

I think you should make a dandelion pattern

You do not have to use enamel or glass to get the effect.

Thank you for using ‘penultimate’ correctly and not skunking my words. I can tell you read as a child 😉

Maybe you should work with Glass. Clay loves being clay, it doesn't need to be changed.

Improbable* I don't think you understand what impossible means.

Beautiful!

Gorgeous!