Making Marks: Discovering the Ceramic Surface - Softcover

Hopper, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574983040 ISBN 13: 9781574983043

Publisher: Amer Ceramic Society, 2008

Synopsis

Making Marks is about ceramic surface enrichment, the processes used for achieving it, and the thought concepts, idea development and personal research behind it. "Making marks" is a generalized term used through the visual arts when referring to the alteration of any surface by any of the tools that artists employ. In using this term for the title of this book, Hopper is referring to the huge variety of marks that may be achieved through ceramic decoration processes, at any or all of the varied and various stages that the clay object goes through in its transformation from soft, wet, malleable clay to heat-hardened, impermeable ceramic.In Part I the fundamentals are covered. Before decoration is done, the stages at which the specific process might be done also have to be considered. Will it be done on wet, leather-hard, bone dry or bisque-fired clay, or as an underglaze or even in or after the glaze firing There are decorative processes for any stage in the cycle. The surface of a ceramic object can be altered at any time, even hundreds or thousands of years after the object was originally made.While you can visually enhance or destroy a form by what you do to the surface, managing it and getting it to work with the form is an art. For those who have basic training in art and design, the first section may be redundant. For those who don't, the first five chapters provide a short, basic, art school primer.Part 2 begins coverage of surface techniques working with plastic and liquid clay processes. The chapters here deal with the process of decoration using graphic tools such as knives, sticks, scalpels, fluting, modeling, sgraffito, expanded spring wires and twisted cutting wires. It then looks at additive and subtractive approaches to surface enrichment, including texture, sprigs, modeling, handbuilding, slip-soaked fibers and washed wax or shellac resist

Edition details

• Publisher: Amer Ceramic Society
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574983040
• ISBN 13: 9781574983043
• Binding: Paperback