Darren Breeze

Club Demo Thursday 10th April 2025

Darren has a studio workshop in Lowestoft which is well worth a visit if you are in the area. It’s easy to find as it is in the High Street at the top end.

He works mainly with colour and texture as these are the real sellers in his studio. For this demo he made a sycamore bowl with a deep sculpted rim with layered colouring.

For our newer members Darren emphasised the A B C of turning:

A = Anchor the tool on the rest

B = Bevel – rub the bevel of the tool (not cutting)

C = Cut – raise the tool handle slowly until the tool starts to cut

Once you have the feel for the cut this action will become second nature.

Darren turned the main shape and reversed it to cut the area to be decorated, leaving the centre to be finished as a bowl later.

The two pictures show Darren using a Proxon disk cutter with a blade from Manpa Tools (shot from the projection screen) and secondly the piece after sculpting and having a white undercoat. The sculpting only took five minutes! Darren made the point that the Manpa blades are not cheap and so if starting out with this sort of texturing you can experiment with 50mm coarse sanding discs on a pad mounted in a cordless drill. It takes longer but much cheaper. He cleaned up the carved area with a nylon bristle wheel in his cordless drill which removed any ‘whiskers’.

Once the white primer was dry, he brush painted a Jo Sonya deep blue into the divots. After drying he applied a water based rainbow wax in a lighter blue, just touching the ridges lightly to highlight them followed by an aqua blue/green, just flicking abross the ridges. A final finish coat of Chestnut acrylic gloss lacquer completed the painting.

Darren then cut beads to delineate the bowl and rim and cut out the bowl centre to finish the piece.

Darren brought along a number of his pieces and he spoke about the various finishes that he had experimented with as shown in the following pictures. Of particular note is the small urn with the verdigris effect and this was done by using Modern Masters paints that use a ‘reactor’ to achieve the aged effects.  Darren used  texturing wheels in many different orientations to create a stunning bowl with a grey/silver finish. The red bowl  was dabbed with gold using a scrunched up plastic bag and then sprayed with methylated spirit from a distance to create a fine mist that blended in the edges. The next three examples used a variation of paints or technique to show what can be done with a bit of experimentation. The blue bowl was sprayed with car paint from a can and then oversprayed with a can of gold string effect before sealing with a lacquer.