Not much tile work to show lately, so here’s a painting, 24” x 36”

This is the annual Senior Class Tile for this year. I’ve done this for a high school in eastern Washington every year since about 2006. It’s always fun to see what they will come up with. They have a contest among the seniors and I put the winning design on a 8” x 8” tile for the lobby of the school.

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.

I’ve painted a lot of tropical fish over the years. Here are some more. These will go in kind of an unusual place, though. They’re going around the base of the walls of a bathroom, like baseboard. There are plain blue ones that go in the corners to fill out each wall, so the tile setter doesn’t have to cut any of the painted ones.

Last weekend at the Bellevue Fair, I had so many people tell me they had a painting of mine, or I had done tile for them. Always good to hear. And a couple of them said they had pots of mine! One lady sent me this picture of a teapot she’s still using. My best guess on a date is some time in the early 70s. It’s pretty ugly, but I can tell you it would pour without dripping, the lid would not fall off when you poured, and the handle or knob would not burn your fingers. This is stoneware, cone 10 reduction, probably made at Pottery Northwest. I loved making teapots and I got a lot better at them than this.

This is a really big tile that I just did for a guy in South Carolina. It’s 13” x 27”, and it’s a very detailed map of Lake Murray. He made it easy for me, as he sent me a full-sized printout of the map, so I just transferred it onto the tile with graphite paper, then followed that line with black china paint in an old-fashioned steel lettering pen. I fired that, then I filled it in with two coats of dark slate grey, firing each time. Pretty mindless, but i enjoy that sometimes.

Here’s another small painting that will be in my booth at the Bellevue Fair the weekend after next.

This lady liked the Kraken backsplash I did a few months back so much she ordered one sort of like it. This one is adapted to wrap around in her space and the colors are more grey than blue, as the first one was. I hope it’s a trend!