Ornament Snow Friend, digital art, 2009
Ornament Snow Friend, Digital Art, Composite, 2009
Left: Kitchen Flower Tiles - A set of the finished tiles, laid out on a table, 2014
Right: Set of Kitchen Flower Tiles, Installed as Backsplash, 2014
Tracing over a scan of the sketch with Adobe Illustrator, 2006
Painting glaze on tiles
Tiles ready to go into the kiln
Finished tile
Far Left: Tracing over a scan of the sketch with Adobe Illustrator, 2006
Left: Painting glaze on tiles
Right: Tiles ready to go into the kiln
Far right: Finished Tile
I don't have any training as a ceramic artist, but friends of mine from GALA had a ceramic arts group and I joined them, at first just to hang out and watch them work. I found out you could paint glaze on pre-made white ceramic tiles. I wanted to avoid uniformity of the tiles and preserve the handmade appearance, so I drew the design on each tile by hand with a pencil and a circle template. I then painted each tile with three layers of underglaze and two coats of glaze. It was really relaxing to sit there and paint each tile slowly while listening to my friends talk about the ceramics they were working on. My friends helped me paint the final coat of glaze and fired the tiles for me. It became a running joke in the group at how long this took me. I started the project in 2005 and I hadn't finished enough tiles for the backsplash until 2014.
