Hannah Billingham – How to make miniatures

Hi, my name’s Hannah Billingham,
And in this workshop, I’m going to teach you how to make miniatures.

This video workshop is 32 minutes long, you will have lifetime access to it, and you will be able to download it to your device.

Example Work

About Hannah Billingham

ARTIST STATEMENT

My artistic practice stems from my admiration of perfection, symmetry and order. I take raw clay and explore the materiality, pushing it to it’s limits on the potter’s wheel and creating highly decorated surfaces.

My inspiration comes from naturally occurring patterns such as the inside of a flower, coral and sea life. The visual impact of my work is of great significance, I create sculptures that evoke a reaction in the viewer through their precision and texture.

Miniature
I consider my work small-scale and miniature, working with a scale between around one centimetre and twenty centimetres high. Even on the smallest forms, I exploit the tiny surface as much as I can with dense decoration.

Glazed
Questions I get asked constantly are ‘How do you colour the dots?’ and ‘Do you glaze the dots individually?’

The colour of the dots comes from adding stain when I mix the slip. The dots are applied individually, but not glazed individually.

I use dipping glazes that I mix from scratch with raw materials.

I never wipe away glaze or wax resist the dots. I do a lot of glaze testing and development to find glazes that work best with my dotted surfaces.

Hand decorated
I explore highly decorated surfaces using a process called slip trailing to build up spherical patterns on sculptural forms. Slip is a mixture of clay and water, and at the right consistency it can be piped like icing using slip trailer tool. The slip dots add a textured element to the surface, which extends the art form from just a visual experience.

Each pattern is applied freehand, with individually piped dots.

Contact: hannahbillinghamart.co.uk