I myself have always found this sort of thing interesting.  I hope you do as well.  This was my first foray into ceramic, so the whole process was new to me.  Thankfully, it went smoothly, Westland was great to work with and they did a great job ~ in a very short time frame, I might add.  Here’s how the process went from my side.

It all started with Westland liking a design of mine and asking if I could provide them with sketches of a variety of products based on it.  I created a total of 38 sketches and from those they chose a few to request revisions, then chose 18 with which to move forward.  Here we’ll be following a candy dish.

We discussed color palettes and I provided swatches for two different ones ~ a brightly colored one and the more muted, vintage look you see on the finished collection.  Once the sketch was approved, I provided a color rendering with color call-outs for them to send to the factory to begin production.

They then made a clay mold of the design and sent it to me to approve.  I was floored at how close to my rendering it was.  The next step was to provide me with a “first-look” painted piece.  My main issues were that I felt the brown was way to dark and the green was too far off from the one we’d agreed upon and that there wasn’t enough contrast between the ground & the vines.

They agreed and went to revision.  The only real stumbling point we had in the whole process was that the factory was having a hard time matching the green.  They sent me a few variations and we agreed upon the green ground from one and the blue vines from another.

This is the final piece that was sent to me for approval via JPEG.  Overall, I think we were all very pleased.

This process was done for each and every piece in the collection (often in multiples rather than just one at a time as I have showed you here).  After all were approved, they shipped me one entire set to see in person and to approve ~ just a couple weeks before the Atlanta show ~ Whew!!!!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.