Indigo Living | Ceramic Stool

Hong Kong's premium designer furniture store, Indigo Living , have paired up with the Sovereign Art Foundation to commission 6 artists to customise a ceramic stool, to celebrate their 40th anniversary.

The stool’s will be auctioned off and the funds raised will help to provide arts based therapy to underprivileged children in Hong Kong and the Asia Pacific region. One of the designs will also be chosen to go into production and a limited edition run will be available for sale through Indigo Living.

Having never painted a ceramic before, I was excited to experiment. My first step (as is usual for me for any new project) was to collate some reference images and produce a mood board as a jumping off point.

I knew that my painting would be inspired by nature somehow, given how much time I like to spend running in the mountains. It is in these landscapes that I am most inspired, and I wanted to weave together snippets from my adventures into an ethereal, dream-like tableau. I also love the dusty pink hues the sky has here at sunrise and sunset during the summer months, along with the abundance of pastel shades used to paint buildings across Hong Kong.

Based on my image research, I sketched up a rough idea of how I envisioned the stool looking:

Next up, I had to work out a way to create a background for the piece that was a soft blend of colours. I particularly loved the marble effect I had seen but was unsure of my ability to hand paint it satisfactorily. The solution came when I discovered a painting technique known as acrylic pouring.
This involves mixing acrylic paint with some type of pouring medium and then poured onto a surface in a variety ways. ... After that, the surface is tilted in each direction to let the paint flow and the colours interact in unpredictable, yet always interesting ways.

I spent hours on YouTube hypnotised by paint pouring videos. My favourite artist is Mixed Media Girl, her channel can be viewed here. I began by experimenting with bowls until I was happy that I had the correct paint consistencies, ratios, and colour palettes. (You can see it took me a while to work out how to extract lumps out of the paint!)

Once I was satisfied with my paint pour, it was time to do the stool.

I allowed this to dry for several days, and then began to sketch my design. It became very quickly apparent that it is hard to draw straight lines on a curved surface and I began to adapt my original design slightly, going with the flow of the piece as I created it.

I finished the piece with touches of gold leaf, gold spray paint, and some gold glitter to help it glisten in the sunshine (which reminds me of the way the buildings catch the light and shine back at you, when you are on the trails.) Finally, the piece was given a resin coating.

Here are some photos of the finished work:

Finally, the piece needed a name! Given that I used an acrylic paint pour technique to mimic the waterfalls I love so much, and subsequently have fallen in love with the technique (watch out for some paintings I will be doing based on this stool), I wanted to somehow incorporate this into the name.

I am a fan of an anagram and enjoy how it can bring a little mystery to a title so therefore;

’Paint poured and more’

becomes

‘dream un-apportioned’

Pirate x

Ps. I’ll update as the project progresses :)