painting pottery

[rogue_artist]

Hello,

another question that is probably well known to everyone but me....

How did they paint the figures on pottery? Was it a glaze that was fired? An ink-like dye? OR paint like egg tempera?

thank you,
-Jason

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

Hi Jason. It must have been an ink-like dye. If you look closely at real vases you can see in the light the line of the brush and the thickness of the dye. You see it was't paper so the dye stayed and dried on the clay. But it was not that thick. You can feel the thickness with your fingertips only in the ends of some lines where the brush has left a spot for example. Early vases,say mycenean or geometrical were painted with a dye that i don't know what it consisted of,and it took its final red-broun-black shades only after baked.
In my opinion,the vase art has not been recognised so much as it deserves. Such pieces of art were made with no chance of erasing a mistake,and only with one movement of the hand for a whole face or a whole hand! Also,i hadn't realized how big some of those scenes were untinl I saw the real things. Some vases are close to 1m hight. Of cource some others are tiny,like 6cm high.
Khaire
Giannis

[Peter Raftos]

Guys,
This is a complex area depending on the type of decoration and firing. Have a look at the Getty Museum's brief explanation to start with.
[url:l7be9rn4]http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/videoDetails?segid=373[/url]

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

This was excellent Peter! Didn't know that even later vases were painted this way and were blackened by heat.
Khaire
Giannis

[Peter Raftos]

I agree Giannis - but I would go one step further and say most ancient technology deserves greater study and recognition. The more analysis of the arts, crafts and technology that is undertaken the better. Given their limited resources these people really put their brains to use.

There is a misfired Attic red-figure amphora, about ca. 450 BC. in the Altes Museum, Berlin, F 2332. Which illustrates partial firing well. See [url]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image ... firing.jpg [/url]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a page on the topic: www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vase/hd_vase.htm
The University of Reading has a nice explanation of techniques: www.rdg.ac.uk/Ure/tour/greek/tech.php.

A good article on ceramic kilns can be found here:
www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ucin1023219003

[Kineas]

Also worth noting that many images were incised before painting--you often have to see the real thing to get the full effect--and that many of the "paints" are actually glazes. I was at the Walters Gallery last weekend (they allow photography!) and I was amazed at the detail, and the size--just as Giannis says. But the fact that, for instance, a shield rim is SHINY while the surface is matte--not just a different color, but a different glaze--is amazing. The shield rim was so obviously bronze (when viewed in situ vs. in a book) that I wondered what else I was missing.

Tomorrow I'll post some photos I took of some vases and a helmet I haven't seen illustrated.

[Nihonius Legio]

I'm pretty sure the Greeks made that famous style of pottery art by firing with a glaze, then scratching into it to make their picture.

[Julilla]

Peter Ling's excellent book, Making Classical Art, has a detailed chapter on Greek painted pottery. He describes the various methods of decoration (painting, incising and relief). He states, "It is generally agreed that the paint that was used for creating the patterns and figures on Greek pottery was a liquid clay slip, which the firing converted into a high gloss coating....on many vases it can be seen that the figured design was given a preliminary shape by a trial sketch...which disappeared in the firing....The two major techniques of vase painting-- black figure and red figure--produce a totally different effect on the finished article after firing, but from the painter's point of view, they would have started the same way: with a brush loaded with slip. For black figure, the slip was applied to create a silhouette figure in solid paint that fired black; for red figure it was the background that was filled in with solid paint."

The book includes several black and white and colour pictures which include fragments which show this process in action; if anyone is curious to see them, I could probably find time to scan some.

Hope this helps!

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

Oh,sure,if you can scan some interesting pages!

[rogue_artist]

Excellent Iulia, thank you!!