Creating Interesting Patterns with Underglazes, Sgraffito Techniques, and a Rolling Pin Tracy Gamble

Workshops and conferences are such fantastic ways to enrich your art making. You leave wanting to try new ideas that can influence your own techniques and work.

In today's post, Tracy Gamble explains how after a week-long surface symposium, she blended two artists’ techniques to take her own work in a new direction. - Jennifer Poellot Harnetty, editor

I’m intrigued and inspired to see what other artists are doing. I hope for openness in myself to try new things and techniques that I can tweak, translate, and transform into my own pots. I also use these techniques in workshops and lesson plans. In January, I attended the Arrowmont Ceramic Surface Forum 2013, in the clay studio at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. During this week-long gathering, participants worked together in the same space, and shared firings, techniques, and ideas. I was inspired by the artists, presentations, and shared demonstrations. I also found some new ideas and techniques to explore in my studio, and am adding my own twists to them as I work.

So far, one of the most successful experiments has involved combining a couple of techniques shared during demonstrations by Lana Wilson and Elizabeth Kendall. Both artists use Amaco Velvet underglazes in widely differing techniques to create wonderful clay surfaces.

Lana Wilson layers the underglazes on leather-hard slabs of white stoneware then marks through the underglazes into the clay. These slabs are then formed into her unique handbuilt pieces (figure 1).

Elizabeth Kendall paints underglazes on a large plaster bat, then pours white porcelain slip onto the decorated plaster. The clay picks up the decoration as it stiffens to slightly less than leather hard and is removed from the bat. This decorated slab is then rolled out into a thinner and thinner slab. The thinner the slab gets, the more the underglaze color on the slab surface is pulled apart and stretched. Once she gets the surface she’s looking for, she forms the slab into various shapes to make her work (figure 2).

I used Lana’s layering and marking technique and Elizabeth’s technique of rolling to thin the slab, pull apart, and stretch the decoration on a terra-cotta clay (figures 3–4). I like this because it’s an easy way to create pattern and add color without the difficulties of making screens and stencils. I used this combined surface decorating technique, along with my own aesthetic choices in terms of color and pattern to make my own pieces. What I found was that these techniques worked well with my own design sense to make a surface that is loose and flowing.

Tracy P. Gamble is a ceramic artist and educator living in Plainfield, Indiana.