Meet our Members - Troy Schmidt

I am a full time potter. I work with ceramics both large and small and have been making scale miniatures since 1993. I juried into the I.G.M.A. as an Artisan in May 1996 and was elevated to Fellow status in March 1999. Today I divide my time between making miniature ceramics as well as life-size pottery and teaching beginning ceramics classes.

My goal is to create true to scale miniature pottery that is aesthetically pleasing as well as “functional”: walls of even thickness, trimmed foot ring, open spouts, removable lids -- the same qualities I look for in a large pot.

I throw my pots on a full size potter’s wheel or meticulously hand form vessels from slabs of clay; none of them are cast or mass produced by molds.

The potter’s wheel that I use is the same wheel that I have used to make 50 pound bowls. The process of throwing miniatures is very much the same as throwing life-sized pottery except I contact the clay with my finger tips rather than my entire hand and all of the motion of my finger tips is contained within a volume not much greater that one cubic inch. 

  

This reservation of movement calls for a great deal of focus and patience.  Over the years I have developed special tools and techniques to use in place of my fingers to draw up, open and shape vessels on the top of a hump of clay as well as methods of shaping and altering my pots once they are thrown.  After forming my miniatures on a revolving mound of clay, they are allowed to dry until they can keep their form and then they are re-centered upside-down on the wheel and a foot ring is carved on the bottom; like their life-size counterparts -- this attention to detail completes the piece.

Troy Schmidt

Red Dragon Pottery

P.O. Box 1347

Goleta, CA 93116

USA

www.RedDragonPottery.com

Troy@RedDragonPottery.com