Picture 001

This was a brown/white/yellow/black sort of swirl that had come out of the kiln off-round and kinda ugly. I was upset about this and got rather "creative" with it on the second try. I heated it viciously and dragged a rake over it counter to the original raking, to see if multiple rake passes would produce the "marbled paper" effect, or just mud.

I also grabbed a nearby bright blue stringer and introduced some spirals into the pattern after all this raking -- if you poke a cold stringer into soft hot glass and twirl it (out of the flame or barely in it) the soft glass will stick to the stringer and form a spiral. Then you burn off the stringer and slump the bleb in, thus forming the dot at the core of the spiral. I called this the PsychoPheasant because of its accidental resemblance to the complex plumage of a pheasant...

It still has a weird surface; the pontil scars at the poles are unacceptable; and the "design" did indeed get muddy in spots. However, I think it shows that complex raking and stringer-twirls can be used to make an eyed "peacock feather" design, which you could do deliberately if you had the skill.