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Making Marks
Making Marks is about enriching the ceramic surface, the processes for doing it, and the concepts, idea development and personal research behind it.
And while “making marks” is a generalized term used throughout the visual arts when altering any surface, 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 stages of the ceramic process.
Learn all the fundamentals
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 The surface of a ceramic object can be altered at any time, even hundreds or thousands of years after the object was originally made.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 (or even a refresher).