Behind the Mud: Going Tall with a Glaze-Driven Tumbler When you spend a lot of time at the wheel, your hands eventually want to push upward. I had been practicing throwing taller pieces, which naturally got me thinking about what I could do with a larger vertical canvas. I didn’t want to jump straight to…
Behind the Mud: Embracing the Mess on a Challenging Form Every form you throw on the wheel brings its own set of rules. For this project, I wanted to step away from standard vertical cylinders and try a classic, flared latte cup. It turns out that wide, sloping walls are a much tougher canvas. Carving…
Behind the Mud: Building a Battle in the Background As you spend more time with the wheel and the carving tools, you start to realize that what you leave flat matters just as much as what you carve. With my earlier mecha pieces, I focused heavily on the mobile suits themselves—letting their giant features morph…
Behind The Mud: Squeezing a Giant Robot Into a Small Canvas Every now and then, the studio presents you with a purely technical riddle. After working on highly exaggerated, chunky sculptural pieces, I found myself holding a much smaller cup and wondering: How much of a giant mecha can I actually fit onto a canvas…
Behind the Mud: Let the Clay Decide the Mecha Morph Every now and then, it’s incredibly grounding to dig back through the studio archives and look at pieces that pushed our boundaries. Looking back to November 2019, I remember sitting at the workbench with a fresh cylinder of wet clay and a desire to try…
There is a unique thrill in bringing a legendary rivalry to life. For this throwback, I wanted to share a pair of handcrafted ceramic tea cups featuring the ultimate anime duo: the RX-78-2 Gundam and Char’s Custom Zaku II. They were meant to be a perfect match—nemeses by destiny captured in clay. But if you’ve…
Every artist’s journey has a starting point—a moment where an ambitious idea meets the raw reality of the clay. Today, I wanted to take a look back at some of my earlier creative works: a pair of hand-carved, Gundam-inspired tea cups featuring the iconic Zaku and Z’Gok. Long before I started experimenting with taller canvases…
Exploring different ways of making Gundam-inspired ceramic functional ware: I found that a taller, larger surface provides a better canvas for the detailed carving I want to achieve, giving me more creative flexibility. I recently came across some fan art with a front view of the RX-78-2 and Zaku II that was pretty cool, so…
Ever wondered what happens when a giant mecha meets a lump of clay? Well, meet the MBF-P02 Gundam Astray Red Frame—in mug form!Bringing this iconic suit to life meant getting messy. I spent hours “mining” into leather-hard clay, carving out deep armor plates and mechanical joints to give it that beefy, 3D feel. Once the…
I dug this one out from a while back. It was an early experiment, trying to see if I could mash up the boxy lines of a Gundam with the flow of totem art. I’ve always been curious why a robot face and a carved mask feel so similar to me. The blue glaze did…