Sgraffito Tile

Progress Photos

Artist Statement:

For this project, I made a clay tile and carved a design for it. This assignment was similar to another sgraffito project that I did last year in foundations of arts so I was familiar with the idea of it. I think this helped me because this was the first ceramics project of the year. To make this clay tile, I wedged the clay and rolled it out to make the tile. I then let it dry until it was leather hard and sketched out my design. Once it was leather hard, I painted on three coats of black underglaze and transferred my sketch onto my tile using a ballpoint pen. I then carved my design onto my tile and once it was fired, I added three coats of clear glaze to it. Throughout this whole process, I got comfortable with the new techniques that I was learning about clay, like how to make sure it doesn't dry out and making sure I was glazing correctly. I decided to make my design a fish because I thought the scales would look cool being carved into the fish.

I really like how it turned out and if I were to change anything about it, I would probably branch out and glaze with a different color other than black. The hardest part of this project was carving out the scales of the fish because it was hard for me to make them all even. The more I looked at the scales though, the more I began to like the unevenness of them because they added texture.