hand-painted ceramics are created with slips and a steady hand

hand-painted ceramics are created with slips and a steady hand

07.05.2020 - Categories: General

Drawing and painting has accompanied us humans long before the Stone Age. It all began with a little coal and a rock face. The oldest drawings in Europe can be found in the Spanish El Castillo Cave and the collapsed Abri Castanet in France, both are about 40,000 years old. The oldest in the world are found in the cave of Leang Bulu' Sipong (Indonesia) and are at least 43,900 years old. They show the living creatures of the time, woolly rhinoceroses and mammoths, in warmer Africa rather giraffes and gazelles. They offer palaeontologists to this day unique insights into the fauna of that time. At some point, however, our ancestors were faced with a problem: the cave walls are full and coal does not come off well. Understandably, you can't move all the time just because the lodge has painted everything full. With time, clay came into people's lives and with the clay came ceramics and ceramic painting. Hand-painted ceramics can be found around the globe and from then on in every developmental epoch of mankind.
While coal and other materials such as milk, blood, limestone or plant resin are very suitable for walls and ceilings, hand-painted ceramics require a heat-resistant paint. The ceramics are finally fired in a campfire at around 600 °C. The first paint bodies that were used were iron oxide, manganese dioxide (manganese dioxide) and engobes. The iron oxides and manganese were hard to find and too valuable to be used to decorate utility ceramics. Engobes, on the other hand, are available in abundance. Engobes are a viscous clay suspension, i.e. simple clay slurry. Since clay is the decomposition product of rock and stone, it is understandably available in a wide range of earthy colours. A vessel made of red clay, for example, is simply painted with white clay and thus accentuated and enhanced in a very charming way. Hand-painted ceramics had not only aesthetic reasons, ceramics were also painted for practical reasons. For example, in the Hallstatt or Early Iron Age (large parts of Europe from around 800 BC onwards) a graphitized engobe was applied to the clay vessel to give it a metallic appearance. Later, in Roman antiquity, the hand-painted ceramics became more and more detailed, skilled and above all finer. It was also no longer painted with the fingers or the paint was blown onto the surface, brushes and other drawing utensils such as the painting croissant were invented and constantly developed. Engo painting was then brought to perfection by the Minoans on Crete, sometime in the 4th century BC.
These drawing techniques for hand-painted ceramics have survived to this day and are associated by many people with the present Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The engobes are applied to the bisqued ceramics and run into each other. One can probably not speak of real hand-painted ceramics in such a way, after all gravity does all the work. In the classical sense, hand-painted ceramics is probably what is known today as miniature painting, which appeared in the Middle Ages. Portraits, still lifes and landscapes are painted by hand on small (ceramic) surfaces such as doodles, brooches and the like with a fine brush and magnifying glass. This branch of art has been maintained until today and is still widely used on utility ceramics, but mostly on porcelain. The strongholds of this painting can be found in Germany in Dresden and Kahla.

Hand-painted ceramics have one thing in common: Engobes and oxides contain very little silicate. This means that after firing they are still matt and have an unpleasantly rough feel to them. They still have to be glazed and this gives hand-painted ceramic the final touch. Many things come together in hand-painted ceramics, and the surface also plays a serious role. The pottery has to be dust-free (which is rarely the case in a pottery studio) and it is a good idea to draw on already bisqued ware, simply because of the resistance of the latter. However, it is particularly absorbent and allows the colours to be absorbed immediately, speed is of the essence. If the colours on the ceramic lack water, they have a mealy consistency and are sensitive to touch. As long as the hand-painted ceramic has not been bisqued a second time, the drawing is very sensitive and can be washed off with water if necessary. 
Finally, the bisqued, hand-painted ceramics can be covered with a glaze. The glaze firing is the last step on the way to the finished ceramic. However, it is not absolutely necessary to glaze the painted shards, but the colours become much brighter through the glaze, as engobes have little or no silicon. The ceramics glow and shine in the wildest colours and delight everyone who sees them. Painting is and has always been a human passion, drawing connects us all over the world and everyone appreciates it and the work that goes into it. The only thing that distinguishes hand-painted ceramics from other paintings is the "canvas". It is just as elaborate as oil painting and it is at least as delicate before firing as pencil calligraphy. With hand-painted ceramics it is even more aggravating that the colours look different before firing than after firing and you draw almost blindly. For example, the colour cobalt blue has the colour lilac before firing, but there is also the colour lilac and it looks like lilac before firing! How does this come about and what do engobes and modern colour bodies consist of?
Engobes are very fine clay, which is why they are only available in earthy colours. The bright colours come from colour bodies which, dissolved in water, produce the colours or glaze. Colour bodies are pigments which have already been highly fired once. Thus one needs chrome green, as the name already says, chrome for the colour chrome green. Cobalt is usually added for better colour mixing. In the colour cobalt blue, cobalt is needed. One quickly notices that the names of the colours derive from their elements. The exact composition of the respective engobes is a closely guarded secret and nobody likes to be looked into the cards. After all, it takes time and experience to achieve the desired colour tone. A certain amount of resistance to frustration is also an advantage so that the joy of experimenting is not neglected.

Beautiful hand-painted ceramics are not necessarily part of the repertoire of a ceramic studio and are a passion, the cave wall was simply full at some point.

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