Not much tile work going on these days so I’ve been painting. Here’s my latest. It’s 12” x 24”.
This is the biggest one I’ve done this year- 80 square feet on 12” x 24” tiles. The drawing shows how it will lay out in the shower. Too bad it won’t be installed till probably February. These big tiles are hard to handle but great to paint on. The single tree is too wide to fit on the table, but you can see how the one tile goes off to the left and the other off to the right.
This one went out last week. It will go around a window in a new condo up at Snoqualmie Summit ski area. It features the mountain itself, the chair list there, a yeti (NOT a Susquatch) hiding in the trees, and the Running of the Rainiers, which all long-time Northwesterners will remember.
This was one of those jobs where everything went wrong from the beginning. This little fish mural is going to a house in the Bahamas, and the job came to me through a designer in Florida. Why are the jobs for designers always the most trouble? So since china paint is affected by the underlying glaze color, the fish couldn’t be done on blue tile. Besides, they were particular about the color of the blue tile. And they wanted a “handmade look”, meaning not flat or square. I could have made them myself, but I haven’t done that in years, so I had a local friend make these tiles and 40 sf of field tiles. They didn't like any of the 4 blue glazes she had, so we had her make them white and then I china painted them blue. This doubled the price for them, but they didn’t care. It was also probably 10 times what it would have been if they’d just used commercial tile. So we did that, shipped them off, and about half of them broke- probably because they were not flat. Having replacement tiles made and shipping them cost me about $700. Shipped them off and sent an invoice, including an invoice taped across the seam of one of the boxes so they couldn’t miss it. A week after I know they’ve gotten them, I email to see if they were OK. They waited 3 weeks before they even opened the boxes. Ten days after they tell me they’re OK, I ask if they’ve sent a check. It went out on Monday. Ten days later, has the check been sent? It went out on Monday. Ten days after that I finally get the final payment yesterday. This job started back in February. i hope they call again some day so I can tell them to go to hell.
Every year since about 2006 I’ve done a tile for a high school in eastern Washington. They have a contest among the graduating seniors to design a tile for their class and I reproduce it in china paint on an 8” tile for them. The tiles are all displayed in the lobby of the school. Due to budget issues, this year’s tile was delayed into the new school year, but here it is.
These tiles just went home last week. They’ll be going behind a stove. They look like traditional majolica tiles, but they’re china paint. I did trace a couple of the outlines of the main shapes, but these are almost completely free-hand, mostly with brushes but the fine black lines are done with a pen. Too bad about the big glare spot, though.
Not much tile work to show lately, so here’s a painting, 24” x 36”
This was another easy one. Client wanted me to reproduce a Henri Matisse cut paper design on her tile. Just had to change the proportions just a bit and match her 4 colors. One of the colors did take me 5 firings to get, but you can see her color samples in the background. I think I did pretty well. Gotta love china paint! This will go ton the wall behind her free-standing tub.
Chickens seem to be a perennially popular kitchen tile motif, sometimes both hens and roosters, sometimes, like this job, just the roosters. These, on 6” tile, will be interspersed with field tile on two kitchen backsplashes.
I don’t post a picture of a job till it’s paid for- call me superstitious. This one was delivered about 6 weeks ago, but the check finally came today. I’ve made these tiles for these folks before. They order about every year or so. Nothing the least bit creative about this one. Just 135 decals. Anybody with a tile cutter and a kiln could do it. But I’m perfectly happy doing stuff like this.
