Graphic Design + Ceramics

In my school, my graphic  design course functinos like an Art 1. It is not difficult to hit all the competencies while incorporating traditional art media with digital media. This year I've been conscious about pairing a digital project with each traditional media assignment. There were 2 parts to the introduction to ceramics, designed to cover techniques that the students would be able to pull from in future assignments with more choices. The first assignment was to make a cylinder which could function as a cup or a mug. This assignment covered slab building, pottery, art history, and surface design.

I started wondering about the history of graphic design in ceramics and when I searched, I found a wonderful resource, Guity Novin's a History of Graphic Design, and chapter 12 is Graphic Design in Ceramics. Bingo! Chapter 13 is on Native American Pottery so I showed some of those examples as well. I'm just pretty pumped to know about this resource!

Here is the slides presentation I showed the students so that I could group images by technique:

After the presentation, I demonstrated a variety of surface design techniques that I asked students to take notes on- sgraffito, underglaze, mishima, slip trailing, carving, and stamping. On the note sheet, the students wrote about which technique(s) they would like to try and then were able to sketch their idea.

The students had the rest of the 1st class to plan then 2-3 classes to construct their cylinders and complete the designs. I demonstrated pulling handles for anyone who was interested.

The design on the left used carving and underglazing. The cup on the right used carving, sgraffito, and mishima with the same repeated pattern.

This student incorporated a favorite quote in her ocean-themed mug.

Some inspiration from the Great Wave!

After the cylinders were complete, the students started on the digital part- designing a magazine cover that featured their cups.  

1. Students watched a video that broke down a magazine cover into parts and completed a worksheet I made to label them.

2. They wrote an analysis of a magazine cover they looked up.

3. Students photographed their cups.

4. Adobe Photoshop was used to create the magazine covers. (It was a quick assignment so I didn't want to tackle introducing new software.)

Here are some of the magazine designs

Painted Papers and Sgraffito

A student tries out the sgraffito method with tempera paint

Once I realized that most of my students were relying WAY too heavily on magazine images in collage work, and not even really changing those images into something new, I decided I needed to go back and do another mini lesson on collage. I showed many examples of Eric Carle's illustrations from books on my classroom book shelf and we talked about how he creates visual texture in his painted papers which are later cut into shapes and glued down to make the picture. One of the painting techniques I demonstrated was sgraffito- applying one layer of paint, putting another on top, and then using the handle of the paintbrush to scratch through the top layer. I just made some simple patterns in my demonstration but the students were totally into sgraffito! Several put so much work into using the technique on their papers that they decided to keep the work as finished pieces instead of cutting them apart. I saw the technique pop up in other projects for the rest of the year. It's fun to see students so excited about a new technique.