Yekaterinburg woman turns funny pottery into thriving business
Anna worked as a manicurist for almost ten years but grew tired of the beauty industry and decided to become a ceramicist
Thirty-year-old Yekaterinburg resident Anna Nekrasova was a highly paid manicurist until a few years ago, when she decided to change everything overnight and take a job at a pottery workshop. There she learned to mold original tableware from clay and ceramics, and then to decorate it with unusual designs. To stand out from competitors, Anna began adding funny inscriptions to her finished pieces.
And you make the frog happy too!
The Yekaterinburg native set up her own mini-workshop right in her apartment. E1.RU journalists visited her to see how handmade tableware is created from scratch. We«re showing you this process too!
We show in this video how Anna creates her creative plates
«Lord, please don«t let it crack»
From the doorstep, the craftswoman«s guests are greeted by cats, flowers and hearts, drawn or molded from ceramics. Cute, at times naive drawings are the main motif in Anna»s work, and the name of her handmade brand matches: «Flowers. Cats. Jokes.» The woman says this signature style began taking shape back at her previous job, when salon clients asked for miniature images painted on their nails.
«Over time, trends changed, people stopped asking for complex designs and painting, and I got bored with being a manicurist. But in reality it«s a very hard, sedentary job. By the age of twenty-two I had problems with my spine. There»s a lot of money in this field, but it all goes toward restoring your health, so I started looking for myself elsewhere — I got a job as an administrator at a pottery workshop and began painting pictures on canvas», the craftswoman says.
Anna makes her pieces from ceramics — a material produced from clays or their mixtures with mineral additives. Tableware made from it is highly durable and hard, waterproof, heat-resistant and eco-friendly. True, ceramics are very capricious to work with, and you can«t predict exactly how a piece will turn out until the very last stage.
«If you take up molding, you have to be ready for a lot of rejects. Even with extensive experience, it«s inevitable. A piece can break or crack. When you»re already applying the design, you don«t fully understand how the glaze will look in the finished form. But that»s where the excitement lies: will it work out or not? Once I painted a plate six times. During firing I just stood there and prayed: “Lord, please don«t let it crack in there”», the Yekaterinburg resident recalls.
The production process itself begins with preparing the clay — it needs to be warmed and kneaded by hand. This, according to Anna, is the most unpleasant stage of the work, requiring a lot of physical strength. Then the clay must be shaped using special templates and sent to dry under plastic wrap for about a week. To keep a plate or mug from changing shape in the process, the craftswoman presses it down with a bag of grain. The woman jokes that there«s no one in Yekaterinburg who buys peas in greater volume than she does.
If something goes wrong at this stage, the clay can be crumpled up and reused, but a dried, let alone fired, piece can only be thrown away. So far Anna«s hand won»t rise to do that, and she keeps failed cups and mugs in a large box on the balcony. Sometimes she looks through them to track her own progress.
«Make the frog happy, pour beer in the mug»
Making a single piece takes on average 10 to 12 days. The final price depends on the time spent on firing (more than a day of continuous operation by the electric kiln) and on painting. For example, a cup with the inscription «Make the frog happy, pour beer in the mug» sold at a makers« market for 2,000 rubles ($26), with its cost excluding labor at about 500 rubles ($6). With a lucky break, the craftswoman earns 130,000–150,000 rubles ($1,700–$1,900) at a single fair.
«Usually I calculate everything individually right before selling. I value my work at an average hourly range. Plus I work with imported clay, which makes my price tag higher. I also like detailed, fine painting, and that«s not quick either. But thanks to this I stand out strongly from other makers. If you look at other ceramicists, you notice they have the same shapes, the same glaze, the same clay. Meanwhile I»ve already built up my own target audience», Anna explains.
Anna considers people with a sense of humor to be «her» audience. Mostly these are women and girls choosing a gift for a friend, and they can be both young and mature ladies.
«For the first two years the hit was a plate with ducks and the caption “Working around the clock”. Everyone understands that joke. Another hit is mugs with cats inside. Though some people don«t get it and call them drowned cats, while others melt and say it»s a bath of tea. For the last market I decided to make a new format — magnets with various gags. They all sold out. It seems people are already tired of mugs, so I have to come up with something new».
Anna has never studied drawing professionally and taught herself everything. At first she copied images from the internet, trained her eye and learned to create her own images. The scheme is the same with the humorous inscriptions — some are spotted online, some suggested by friends, others invented by chance.
«Some of the inscriptions come on their own. For example, at one market a woman in a fluffy white coat walked past me. I stand there repeating to myself: “White, fluffy…I«m white and fluffy when I drink sparkling wine.” I thought: I need to write that down, put the inscription on a mug or a plate. Sometimes I do painting to order. Once I developed a design for a child»s deep plate with geese running across a field — so he«d be motivated to finish his soup and see the whole picture», the craftswoman says.
There are also those who don«t care for Anna»s humorous inscriptions. At makers« exhibitions she sometimes hears people say there»s no point paying for such cups — you could make them yourself. The craftswoman takes such remarks calmly: what matters is that most buyers understand the labor-intensity of handmade work.
Soon Anna and her husband will move to their own country house, where the craftswoman will have her own full-fledged workshop. Her husband has always supported her in this endeavor, though as a person with a technical mindset he didn«t understand the pull toward creativity. The needlewoman jokes that when all her plates and mugs move into their own room, she»ll finally feel like a truly grown-up ceramicist.
Did you like Anna«s story? Read also how another Yekaterinburg resident, Ilyana Bulatova decided to quit her job in the medical field to devote herself to creativity. She came up with the idea of sculpting goddesses from polymer clay and turning them into charms with stones. The figurines are usually dedicated to zodiac signs and are a big hit with women.
Or take a look at the work of Milana Khlyustova: at first glance these drawings can«t be distinguished from photographs. The secret of her skill lies in using an airbrush, a special tool that sprays paint in the thinnest layer.
