how I sgraffito my pottery ☀️ a step by step surface design tutorial

Let's make a Sgraffito plate like this. Sgraffito is a technique done by painting color onto clay and then carving through it to create a design. I like to do Sgraffito using underglaze so I'm going to start by painting three coats of black underglaze onto my plate. I'm using the Amaco brand velvet underglaze line. These are my favorite underglazes to use because they have such high pigmentation and they brush on really nicely and are just overall really easy to use and give you really nice color. It's important to apply three layers of underglaze so that you get full coverage so wait for your first layer to dry and then you will apply two more. Underglaze will change and burn out in the kiln so sometimes your color will look really good before the firing but then after the firing it'll be patchy so applying three thin but even coats will help prevent this. When I have three layers of underglaze and it's fully dried I'll clean up the edges of my plate. I really love the Kemper carving tools. I use a wide square edged one and a smaller pointed loop ended one. One of the most important things about doing Sgraffito is for your piece to be the right consistency and dryness. Sgraffito should be done on true leather hard clay. You should be able to carve into the piece and have your clay come off in clean strips without sticking to the clay around it. If your clay is too dry it will wear down your tools really quickly and maybe chip your underglaze off where you don't want it to and if your clay is too wet it will just be really hard to work with. You can recognize leather hard clay because it's kind of like the consistency of parmesan cheese. You can dig tools into it but you can't alter the shape of your vessel anymore without it cracking. If I tried to bend this plate right now it would just snap in half. You can absolutely just sketch a design onto your vessel with pencil which I do a lot or you can transfer a design onto it. This is a design template that's included in my online class which is all about ceramic surface design. It comes with a few different design templates which is a really cool way to get started doing Sgraffito even if you don't have drawing skills. You just print out the template, cut it to fit your vessel, and then trace it onto your piece using a ballpoint pen and this will create little indents that you can then carve. It's important to use a ballpoint pen because it's dull enough to not really cut into your clay and it glides across the paper really nicely. I pick up my template to make sure that it's working nicely but I always keep one hand on it to keep it in place until I'm completely done. That way my design doesn't get offset. Next I'll carve the outline with my small loop tool and I'm just tracing the indent that I made with my template. Notice how my carvings are coming off in clean ribbons. You'll know if your is too wet if your carvings are sticking to each other or sticking to your piece and it will get real messy real quick. I like to keep a wide and soft paintbrush nearby to brush off the carvings as they start to pile up. It's important that this brush is totally dry so that it doesn't smudge your underglaze and it helps if it's pretty soft too. One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when they are working with Sgraffito is to stop at the outline. This is beautiful but your piece will be so much more interesting and dynamic if you take it beyond this point. After I add the outline I'll start playing with line weight which at its most basic means the thickness of your lines. Adding some variation in this department will really start to bring your composition from something simple and flat to something with way more flow and visual interest. And the key here really is variation. You don't want to thicken all of your lines but rather play with using line weight to emphasize certain parts of the composition, convey depth, or to depict shadows. After line weight I think it's so crucial to fill some of the empty spaces in your design which will help it feel more complete. For this piece I decided to divide each mountain peak into two sections and add hatching to one and add some solid blocks to the other. Obviously this is super stylistic and not realistic but I'm imagining it as a simplification of the shadows created by the edges and variation on a mountain range and the sun shining on one side creating a shadow on the other side. And everything I've done up to this point I've only used two carving tools for. I'm a big believer that fancier tools don't make you a better artist but rather practice and refining your skills make you a better artist. When I do sgraffito I only need a small loop tool. I believe it's called a wire stylus and a wider square edged one. I use one from the Kemper ribbon tool set and there's links to these in the description. You can already see how filling in these shapes in the mountains is adding so much more to the composition and making it so much more interesting. There's a lot of different ways you can do this. You can use blocking, hatch marks, sometimes I'll add some contour lines along the inside of a shape, and then for the clouds I'm going to add dots. These are really artistic decisions I'm making based on how I perceive the texture of what I'm representing. So mountains are rough and rigid so I'm using more angular lines but clouds are soft and fluffy so I'll fill that space with softer shapes. These are just guidelines and suggestions for how you might approach composition in sgraffito and there's a lot of thought that goes into all of these artistic choices and I dig way deeper into all of this in my online class Sculpt, Carve, Decorate. It's all about ceramic surface design techniques for functional pottery and this is one of the demos but I'll also show you how to integrate color and glaze into your sgraffito pieces and I'll talk more about composition planning especially for vessels like mugs because it can be tricky to plan a design and fill space on a vessel that you can rotate and see from multiple angles. In the course we'll also learn how to create sculptural additions onto your vessels like this. If you're interested there's a link in the description and you'll also get access to all of those downloadable templates of my designs that you can transfer and sgraffito onto your own vessels. And then one of my favorite ways to finish a piece is to add some little stars in the background. After the first firing, the bisque firing, you'll want to add some clear glaze to your piece. Wild clay, when fully fired to the temperature it's rated for, is fully vitrified meaning it will no longer absorb water but it will still have a little bit of texture and this can make it hard to clean which can cause it to trap bacteria. For your piece to be totally functional you should apply clear glaze to the top which will give it a nice finish and make it easy to clean. I love the amaco zinc free clear glaze and I use a wide and soft fan brush to apply it. Like applying underglaze you want thin even coats. The bottle says to apply three coats but I find that this glaze behaves best with just two and that if I apply three or apply it too thick it gets a little cloudy. Here's how this piece turned out. Obviously there's so many other little details and tips and tricks and my course will go way more in depth into all of that. I'll show you how to start combining color and sgraffito and working glaze into your compositions. And a big chunk of the course is all about adding sculptural elements to your wares. You don't need any clay or sculptural experience. I'll walk you through how to approach sculpting complex forms in a way that's super accessible. When you join the course you'll also get access to a community of all my students where you can connect and share your work and you can ask me questions along the way and get direct and personalized feedback on your projects. The link is in the description.