Sgraffito Tile

Artist Statement:

For this piece, we were given a sgraffito tile and were allowed to choose our own subject. I chose to base my piece on the leopard gecko my brother and I spontaneously got over quarantine and named Lizardo. Lizardo is a leucistic leopard gecko and lacks pigment where he should have bright spots, and he only has a line of faint pigment that goes runs his back. In my piece, I highlighted those patches of pigment. I also placed the lizard on top of a rock and made this interesting swirl pattern around him to represent their natural habitat and their love of laying on top of rocks and soaking up the sun.

The materials used in this piece were sgraffito tile and a double-ended metal tool used to cave out the clay. I first sketched my image onto the clay, then I used the finer tip to outline things then I went over some areas with the larger tip. I really liked using the graffiti tile, it was hard at first, but the more I kept doing it, I found my own technique that worked for me. As you can see, I did break my tile on accident before I started working, but in the end, everything ended up working out.

The process of this project was quite simple, it just took a while because there were a few steps. First, we had to find our subject, usually, it's not easy for me to find a subject because there are always multiple choices and I'm not great at making decisions, but this time I already had something in mind going into the project. The next few steps were to draw out the design on paper then on scratchboard to figure out our values. The last step was to create the tile. Overall I really liked how this project turned out. Although there is one thing I wished I could change which is one of the feet I accidenatlly cut off his toes a bit because it was the first thing I did on the board. But I don't think it's too bad because the complexity of the rock takes away from it.