george koller on sun 10 sep 00
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> > Okay, I'm new to this forum. I've read the responses on everything that's come across my screen. Now I'm ready for a new topic, so I'll throw it out there and see what happens.
> >
> > Photographic images on pottery.
Cleo,
"Images on clay" is some 5,000 plus years old, and I'm beginning to feel like the "photographic images on clay" thing is almost this old...... well no, not really!
There are a lot of past threads that weave in and around this. You can look in the archives. There are the decal folks, and a covet of copier carbon devotees. I really don't know how
far along that all is, if their processes are at all repeatable. My years of work on this has pretty much convinced me that software designed from the bottom up to take information
from images and actually perform specialized tasks on the clay can play a important new role in all of this. I don't know how such things as resizing to fit the work piece, and the
mapping of glaze colors to image colors can all be done without software. Good work for a computer I think, it takes my computer hours to do an image, and work out all the moves the
machine will have to make. I think specialized "clay" software will be the way, and this is the approach we are taking.
What we are working on is superficially like a "ink jet on steroids", and photographs are just one source, a very fascinating one, of our images. I did our first tile mural from a
photograph of a boat in a brochure more than 2 years ago. Had a very pleased customer, and I became hooked on the idea of using software and electro-mechanical stuff to take the
thing a whole lot farther. First step was to improve the speed of the software/hardware by about 600X so it could handle the huge amount of detail that can lurk in the most innocent
image.
We support line art, a sgraffito process which was our "break and butter" for couple of years and we are now working hard to support the much more artistically exciting "Kurt Wild
decorating technique" for which we use a special nozzle to lay down a very fine beam of the metal sulfates. It all started working together first two weeks ago. (Almost every glaze
we test with these sulfates has one beautiful affect or another, then there is the "water colors on porcelain" thing, there is much to explore, almost too much.)
The fascinating possibility seems to exist to do such things as to accurately reproduce in-situ historical mosaics from photographs in what I think will be "museum quality". And do
this wonderfully economically. Things like this will help me push the limits of my software and the bunch of gizmos it drives. It is strange to think about, but this machine is
working with 100,000 points per inch and doesn't care if it is working on a reproduction of one of those wonderful Pompeii mosaics, or churning out "trivets for tourists". This is why
I keep making efforts to share this process, and gain interest from the really good clay artists. It is happening, it will happen.
If you are interested in learning more, write me off-list,
Sincerely,
George Koller
Programmer/Potter/Plumber - here on the "thumb" of Wisconsin where the winds are blow'in a little harder these days. Something a sailor notices.
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