Tile Design Project

For the tile design project, the first step was to find inspiration online to make our own tile designs. After I found a few tiles that I liked, I took inspiration from those and designed my tile. We labeled each area of the drawing depending on what levels we wanted the different pieces of the tile to be at: low, medium, and high. Next, we made a prototype tile to use to make our molds. To make the prototype tiles, we cut out the pieces of our drawings and used them as a template to cut out the different pieces of clay. After making the prototype tile, we made our plaster molds. To do this, we made a square mold shape out of wood, and poured plaster over our prototype tiles and let them dry. When they were dry, we took them out and had a mold for our tiles. I then went on to make sure all of the undercuts in the mold were taken care of and tried to smooth out the edges as much as I could, so that I could have a smooth, clean tile. After this step, we started to make our tiles using the mold. To do this, we pressed clay into the mold. After about 10 minutes, we could take our tiles out. We banged the molds on the tables to do this. My first tile came out having a lot of small bits of plaster on it. Because of this, that tile had to be thrown away because plaster doesn't do well in the kiln. My next tile came out the same, so that one had to be thrown away as well. After those 2 tiles I had to scrap, the next 4 came out pretty good. All I had to do was smooth out the edges a little bit and make sure everything stuck together nicely. I let those dry on my shelf, then they were bisque fired. After they were bisque fired, I picked out my glaze colors. I used yellow, teal, and red glazes. I made the lowest layer of my tile teal, the middle layer red, and the highest layer yellow. After they were fired, Bailey and I realized that our tiles went very well together. Because of this, we decided to combine our tiles. We glued them to a board and we were finished.