Sgraffito Nameplate

Sgraffito

MAY 2, 2018 — sgraffito

For this project, we were assigned to make nameplates for our upcoming art exhibition. We had to do so using clay and a technique called sgraffito.

I really didn't want to do this project, mostly because using clay stresses me out, but I managed to do it anyway (for the sake of my grade). I decided that I wanted to make it look like an eye, since a lot of my works contain eyes and I thought it would be cool to make it go with it. After shaping the clay and letting it dry, I painted over with the first two layers of glaze. Once that was dry, I used scratchboard tools to scratch off the glaze in the way that I wanted. I decided to keep it basic—just my name and an eye—but it still took a while to scratch off all of the white space necessary. After that was done, I did go back in and add some designs in the iris, mostly to contribute to the overall contrast of the piece. After this was done, it was fired, I added some more glaze to make it shiny, and then it was done.

As mentioned, I don't like using clay, so this project wasn't my favorite. I did make an attempt to make it look nice though, and I tried to add contrast where I could. There are, admittedly, some black specks in the white of the eye, but I didn't notice them until after it was fired and then it was too late. Overall, though, I think that my piece has good contrast and that it will make an okay nameplate for the exhibition.