Tiffany Scull – How to decorate a vessel with Angelfish using handmade slips and sgraffito

During this workshop I will be talking about my excitement for slip and sgraffito decoration. I will be discussing how to prepare your leather hard form with your own design. I will show you how to create and test a handmade slip, and give you the recipe. You will learn how to apply and layer slips and how to create very complex clean designs. I will also be teaching you how to create very detailed sgraffito decoration and showing you the handmade tools I use. With over twenty years of experience specialising in slip decoration and sgraffito this will be a great opportunity to pick up many of the methods I have perfected over time.

After this workshop, you could be making amazing work like this:

Workshop Steps:

STEP 1
We will start with a quick talk on health and safety and using dried clay and toxic colours
STEP 2
We will be learning how to create your own handmade slip from scratch, how to test this colour and I will give you the recipe for this slip.
STEP 3
We will briefly be talking about how to prepare your leather hard form for your decoration using tracing paper. This can already be carved with your design or a smooth surface. I will also show you how to organise your colours in order of use.
STEP 4
We will be marking out your design and the details using paper or tracing paper
STEP 5
We will be preparing and applying several pre made coloured slips on to our forms and learning how to create a clean edge so the colours don’t bleed into each other
STEP 6
We will be drawing on very detailed sgraffito decoration using handmade tools
STEP 7
We will be applying dots of slip to our finished decoration and form

At the end of this workshop you will have gained the knowledge to be able to go on and create as many different slip colours as you would like for your work and know how to test these. You will be able to map out a design onto a leather hard form and understand how to organise your slips and drawings beforehand. You will have an understanding of how to create a slip design using lots of contrasting colours in separate areas and how to layer and blend your colours. You will also be able to produce very fine detailed sgraffito drawings without using the traditional loop tools. I have no doubt this workshop will help you to develop new, detailed and colourful designs that are unique to your work.

Required Materials & Equipment List:

SLIP TEST SECTION
Good lighting
A set of scales that will weigh 0.1 grams or at the very least 1 gram
A jug that will measure 100 ml of water
Two plastic tea spoons
A larger jug with clean water in it
A piece of shiny coated paper cut from a magazine approximately 15cm by 15cm square
Dried clay that will weigh over 100 grams. I use turnings saved from my pots
A small pestle and mortar
A small test sieve mesh count 100
A powdered cobalt blue body stain 0.5 grams
A large plastic pot that the sieve sits into comfortably
A pastry brush or a stiff bristled brush
Several small plastic pots with lids that will take 100 ml of water
A good face mask with filters on.
A small rectangle piece of leather hard clay measuring around 5cm wide by 10 cm long by 1 – 0.5 cm thick this must be the same as your dried clay
A bath sponge cut into quarters
A small piece of bath sponge cut into a piece around the size of your thumb
Small bathroom towels

MAPPING OUT YOUR DESIGN SECTION
A leather hard form smooth or pre carved with your design
Your design already drawn out for reference
Your designs drawn onto tracing paper and cut out leaving a small gap between the end of the drawing and the paper edge
A banding wheel
A soft clean surface to lay your pot down onto this can be towels inside a pedal bin liner or a board with a piece of flat thick foam cut the same size as the board and placed inside a pedal bin liner
White small pedal bin liners
Clingfilm
A small face flannel or towel
Tiny hand embossing tool

SLIP DECORATION SECTION
several size 4 synthetic artist paint brushes
size 1 synthetic artist paint brush
Make up applicators used for eye shadow
Tiny needle applicator bottle
Wood doweling 15cm long and 0.5 cm wide
piece of soft foam cut to a square of 4cm x 4cm by 0.5cm thick placed over and around the top of the doweling sewn in place and bound with cotton around the base to create a pad
Plastic paint palette
Small pipette
Several coloured clay slips
A plastic pot that your ceramic piece will sit in upside down

SGRAFFITO SECTION
Fabric plaster
A large soft synthetic brush around half an inch
size 4 clean and dry synthetic artist paint brush
Two tiny nail art brushes
Metal Dentist probing tools
Scalpel blades and number 3 handle

When you buy this workshop, you get:

• Watch my Live Online Workshop
  • The workshop is taking place on 26th October 2022 at 10 AM PST, 1 PM EST, 7 PM CET
  • The workshop will be around 1 hour long.
• Bonus Q&A
  • Join my bonus Live Q&A where I answer questions about my process face-to-face
• Lifetime Access to the Replays
  • The workshop and the Q&A are recorded, and you will have lifetime access to it. You can watch it online, or download it to your device to watch offline at any time

Tiffany works from her Dorset studio based on the beautiful Isle of Portland creating ceramic forms decorated by hand with detailed Sgraffito drawings of many different plants and animals from around the world. Over time she has developed a very distinctive and unique way of painting with clay slips, carving and using sgraffito to draw her designs onto each form.

Tiffany says ‘discovering and specializing in the decorative technique of Sgraffito has allowed me to pair up my two loves of drawing and clay work’. She views every unique work as a three-dimensional clay painting and a celebration of the natural world. Trying to capture the movement and interaction between different creatures she finds very exciting and hopes to give the impression a bird may take flight from its ceramic home at any moment. Special care is taken to place each creature with in its correct habitat and extensive drawings and research go into all her designs.

Every unique design created starts life as a detailed line drawing and once she’s happy this is transferred by hand onto the clay surface. Each piece has been thrown on the wheel, left to slightly dry and then goes through many different processes and techniques developed over her years as a ceramic artist to created her intricate images onto the damp clay surface, this takes many hours and no two pieces will ever look the same.
Once completed these are left to dry for a few weeks and fired in an electric kiln during which she selectively glazes her main themes leaving the rest of the decoration matt.

She has exhibited her work with many different galleries and shows across the country including, The New Ashgate, Cambridge Contemporary Art, Gallery Bevere, The Ceramics Centre in London and Art in Clay at both Hatfield and Farnham. She is a selected member of the CPA and a full member of Make Southwest.

Sgraffito – This word translated from Italian means ‘to scratch away’ and has been used by many cultures to decorate buildings, paintings and pottery.

www.tiffanyscullceramics.com

www.instagram.com/tiffanyscullceramics/