A practical guide to all forms of decoration for pots and sculpture. This step-by-step guide encourages you to explore the full range of surface treatment techniques and teaches you how to obtain a professional finish to your work by suggesting an appropriate finish choice. Surface Decoration looks at all manner of surface decoration techniques, at every stage of the ceramic process and from a practical perspective explains how to achieve these effects. The book explores a variety of innovative and contemporary approaches to surface finish including sgrafitto, resist methods, sprigging, trailing, glaze layering, lustre, transfer, impressing, incising and textural methods amongst others. This is the perfect guide for any ceramic artist interested in exploring new surface decoration techniques.

Erwin Eisch, a pioneer of the international Studio Glass movement, has helped establish the medium in Europe. His distinctively distorted glass vessels and imaginative sculptures of mould-blown glass challenge the distinctions between art forms and between realism and abstraction. This book also includes Eischs paintings, drawings and vitreographic prints. This book provides an introduction to the artist, from his development within the glass-making tradition of the Bavarian Forest to the present. Eisch began with functional vessels, including bottles, vases and steins, often distorting the hot glass, incorporating ceramic moulds and producing painted glass sculptures. Eisch uses glass, painting, drawing and printed graphics to overcome the borders between picture and sculpture. His later output includes drawings, paintings and prints. Eischs works incorporate vivid elements of imagination and fantasy, which supplement the reality that inspires him. This book includes essays, contributions by experts on his work, more than one hundred illustrations of Eischs work, and selected writings by the artist himself.

This book is the first comprehensive synthesis of the life cycle of ceramics and of refuse management in ancient Palestine during the later Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic periods (4th to 11th centuries CE). The study sheds light on selected material culture-related behavioral practices of the people who produced, used and manipulated ceramics during late antique and early medieval times. The research presents the local picture of pottery use-life, including prime use, reuse, repair, recycling and disposal. The reuse, repair and recycling of pottery reflect a plethora of behavioral practices, some common to the greater Mediterranean and Near Eastern world and some unique to the discussed region and periods. Similarly, the discussion of refuse disposal, while using selected case studies, has shown that attitudes towards the residues of people's activity were basically similar in different regions and periods, though the ways in which refuse was managed was often dictated by specific cultural and regional circumstances. Finally, a first attempt has been made in this study to partially unveil the mental rationale behind the above-mentioned practices. The conclusion is that mere pragmatism motivated the rather frequent reuse, repair and recycling of pottery, though it also showed that this tendency became more dominant - in historical Palestine and probably elsewhere - in Late Antiquity and later.