Sgraffito tile

Six sgraffito tiles, earthenware, with coloured glazes. Bottom left is Pride; next to her is Plenty with a cadaceus.

Earthenware tiles, sgraffito and with coloured glaze, emblematic of Music.

Stoneware floortiles, inlaid or encaustic

Autumn berries on inlaid ceramic tile surface

Girl wearing jewelery; one of a set of outdoor tiles for next to my greenhouse, hence she holds a plant. Sgraffito stoneware tile, with coloured glazes and underglaze.

Floor tiles - experimenting with different ways to inlay coloured slip into a lightly-molded tile. Stoneware. The design is of course  a waterhorse or hippogryph, a sketch of one I spotted in a local pond.

Weights for garden netting. For a net over a strawberry patch, it seemed appropriate to make small sgraffito weights with mostly flower designs.

Fired test pieces, different clays, glazes and heights in oven; there is slight sinkage of the glaze into the slip underneath in the lighter colours. 

Here are the set of test tiles for lower in the kiln, for the second, hot firing (1200 centigrade). Glazing half of each tile to see if it is indeed the glaze which causes the melting, as I suspect. 

Here are test pieces in the kiln after biscuit firing; annoyingly, one piece exploded - a shame, as they were in pairs (4 colours slip + 1 base clay, one of the pair for lower in the kiln, one higher. So be it. 

After some stoneware tiles came out streaky, I wonder if glaze plus thin slip of certain colours is melting together, unlikely though it seems. This is a test firing to check it out. Here is my normal range of slip colours, with simple sgraffito heads, going in for first (biscuit) firing. 

The tile in this image was inspired by a medieval chest I saw in Ruislip Church, west London (see http://www.speel.me.uk/chlondon/ruislipch.htm), and which I took a quick sketch of; in my tile I added a vaguely medieval girl who was not actually present in the church when I visited. 

Stoneware glaze firing in the kiln, sgraffito tiles

Sgraffito tile, girl with palm leaves - this is a stoneware piece, hence the strong colour. About 7 x 6 inches