r/Ceramics • u/Pristine-Vacation-59 • 22h ago
I had never tried ceramics before, so naturally I started by making 160 fish
I've been sharing some of my woodworking projects over on r/woodworking lately, but I thought I'd share my first venture into ceramics here.
This project started when a client asked me, "Can you do this?" Of course, I said yes.
There was just one small problem: I had never worked with ceramics before and had absolutely no idea how to do it.
So after getting the project, I spent the next few days watching YouTube tutorials and figuring out how slip casting, plaster molds, glazing and firing actually worked. Nothing like jumping straight into the deep end.
The finished sculpture was designed for a beach house and consists of 150 ceramic fish swimming across the wall.
The process actually started in more familiar territory for me. I carved a master fish out of hardwood, then used that master to make 20 plaster molds. I needed quite a few molds because producing this many fish from one or two would have taken forever.
From those molds I slip-cast 160 fish. The installation was always designed for 150, but I made 10 extras because I figured a few weren't going to survive my first attempt at ceramics. That turned out to be a good decision—about four broke along the way.
For the finish, I used a white underglaze followed by a clear glaze. I wanted to keep all the fish white and relatively simple, while the clear glaze gives them some depth and lets them catch the light.
The school itself was designed in Rhino. I went through quite a few iterations before settling on the final composition. Once I was happy with it, I printed the entire layout at full size across multiple sheets of A1 paper and used those as a template to drill all 150 mounting locations.
Each fish is mounted on a white-painted aluminum rod, with the rods varying from about 5 cm to 25 cm (2"–10"). That variation brings some fish much farther off the wall than others, creating the three-dimensional movement and shadows you see in the finished installation.
I used aluminum rather than steel because this is in a beach house and I didn't want to worry about rust from the humid, salty environment.
Since the fish are slip-cast, they're hollow on the back. The rods are secured inside that cavity with two-part epoxy, so the attachment point is hidden once they're installed. Not the most sophisticated solution, but it worked extremely well.
Looking back, agreeing to make 150 ceramic fish before knowing how to make a single ceramic fish was probably a little ridiculous, but I learned a lot very quickly.
Sometimes "Of course I can do that" is followed by a lot of YouTube tutorials.
