T i l e s

For our first assignment of semester two we were told to create tiles. At least four tiles were to be made and they had to someone connect into a pattern. We made the tiles identical by first creating one single tiles that we wanted. After we finished Out single tile and had the design laid out, we used plaster to make a mold for our tile. After our mold was fully dried we could press clay into it to make multiple identical tiles. For my design I didn't really have a specific idea in mind. I decided to keep it simple and go with a circle and added some petal like shapes in the middle so it wasn't so plain and boring. For this project I used clay, a wooden tool, a metal needle tool, exacto knife, and glaze. I chose a variety of glaze to color my tiles. I went with the theme of maily blues but to add a pop of color I used yellow because I thought the blue and yellow would benefit from each other really well. I started out by individual cutting out the shapes I wanted in order to make my tile 3D, after that I poured the plaster over the tile and let it sit and dry. When pressing in my clay later on I made sure to get it in really well because if you weren't careful you would take it out and there would end up being gaps in the tile. After a lot of tries I got four ok tiles, I went back and did some touch ups to smooth out the edges and gaps. I would say the most challenging part of this project was the making each tile from the mold because they would never come out correctly which became really annoying. They didn't look too good at first but once they were fired they looked better. I glazed them and now i'm waiting for them to be fired. Overall I enjoyed this project, it was definitely one of the more challenging projects but I think the end result will be worth it !

This is my tile process:

I started by using my sketch to trace where I would place my designs and cut them out. The first four images is the tile I created by hand before I made my mold and then the last two images are the ones that came out of the mold and in the process of being glazed.