Sgraffito Tile

For this project, I made a clay slab that was 5" x 7". (It shrunk a little) The technique used for this project was sgraffito, which is when you scratch underglaze off clay to make a design.

I used black underglaze on the slab when it was leather hard. After the three coats of glaze dried. I traced my sketch onto the slab and then scratched off the parts that would stay white. I wanted the design to look like a silhouette, so I didn't add shadows or texture.  Once it had been fired, I used the clear glaze HF-10, which is a shiny coat.

I decided to do this design because I had a project from Foundations of Art that I used puppets in and really liked. The reason the scissors have strange shapes on them is because I was trying to imitate how shiny metal scissors look when things reflect off them.  The eye is also supposed to look like a weird bug.

I think the finished product is somewhat successful. The design looks pretty close to how I sketched it out, but the parts where the clay has been carved away look messy. Also, there a chunks taken out in some places because I didn't carve it evenly. One thing that I would change about this design is the white space in the back. I didn't want to back to look completely white, and I was going to do a fade from white outlines around everything to black, like something from a comic. I couldn't get it to look right though, so I just scratched it all off.