The oven was built on Vashon and delivered to us in 2016. Our client was looking for a pizza oven that would be fun for his kids to grow up with and learn how to cook. We tossed around ideas having to do with dinosaurs, dragons and sea creatures. I drew up a sketch working with the oven shape and we were off.
I brought in my good friend and sometime collaborator, Nadine Edelstein. We design well together and with her skills with tile and stone, I knew we would be able to make something beautiful.
Before we started with the actual layout, we gathered our materials and created sample boards. We played with the shape of the scales and the color pallet we would use. Then we began to layout the scale pattern onto the body of the oven in order to turn this rotund oven into a dragon like - sea creature. Nadine cut white pebbles into thousands of thin slices that looked like petals and I used them for the scale outline, while Nadine worked on the humps, tail and fins, also using cut white pebbles. I outlined and filled in the scales with a pallet of marine colored glass and ceramic tiles including Italian smalti and millefiori.
To top it off, our oven clearly needed a crown. So we created a template and took it to be fabricated out of copper and steel. Once the copper was treated and the pieces reassembled, we were done. We named her NEPTUNA!
Check out the slideshow to see the project progress from start to finish!
