Remember that maiolica tile I painted? Yeah, I still haven’t taken it to get fired, but I painted a plate, too!
A bunch of us got together and bought a few little pieces to work on together. Some of us had practice tiles.
Some of us had plates. Amata threw that plate herself. On a wheel, not, like, against the wall or anything.
It was fun to see the progression from pricked design…
…to sketched outline…
…to finished tile.
I was particularly happy with my plate. I tried to incorporate elements from my coat of arms along with two Tudor roses, one each for my husband and my champion, both of whom have Elizabethan personas.
So, one of the cooler things I got to play with was Amata’s banding wheel, a tool that lets you make perfect circles by spinning your plate and holding the brush stationary. I… may have gone overboard with it on the back. I also added a maker’s mark: “Per Manum Elen,” which means “By the hand of Elen.” My Latin-major friend suggested that I should possibly have changed the name to the genitive case, making it “Per Manum Elenae,” but I didn’t think about that until he pointed it out. I’m just going to use the fact that Elen was suitably removed from classical Rome in both time (1380) and place (Monmouth, Wales) to explain the lapse.
