PLAYING WITH COLOR

I now had a couple of dozen orange/red tiles and the same number of turquoise/gold-colored tiles, each with different patterns and different sizes of tile.

But would they work well together in a shower and should I make more of them or create more using other colors?

Being a visual person, I unfolded my long work table, got out the orange and blue tiles and lots of other ceramic tile shapes that I had already made. Oh, and some glass pieces too.  It was time to play!

I asked my facebook friends whether they thought these combinations were too bright for a shower.  Some of the Facebook responses were:

• Dayna Hanks Umm, is there any such thing as too colorful? I think it's great!
  

  Katherine Finkel beautiful...as always

  Jae Anderson It's perfect :)

  Curtis Swagnificent Alcutt looks great to me! :-)

  Yoli Rodriguez Manzo Me likey!

  Michelle MacKenzie I am the wrong person to ask about too bright! These are stunning and would make the shower an uplifting place to get clean!
  
• 
  

  
  

Trying various combinations of these disparate pieces, I felt comfortable with having a really colorful shower area!  Remember, I would probably keep the existing bland beige/white for the inner core of the shower, but face the sides and tops with vivid tiles.  Here are samples of some combinations that I played with.

 

But I needed many more tiles to really experiment with the layout.  I used many of the initial orange, cascade yellow, red and amber colors but used a different technique than the first set.  More flowing and circular, rather than straight brush strokes. The second pix below also has a very bright orange yellow glaze that might be fun on the ceiling of the shower.
 

The last step is to loosely brush some clear glaze (which looks bright green before firing) over the previous color layers; this enhances the color.


Before the glaze dries completely, I move the tiles apart so the edges will dry better individually. That allows me to clean the edges more easily with a damp sponge.  The first set of 3x6" tiles goes into the kiln, shelf by shelf of tiles.


Now it is time to make some more bluish tiles, but I wanted them to have more texture than the first batch, and maybe some more green. The colors shown here are misleading indeed. What looks like rust and orange will be turquoise and green after firing.  Then, before the thick glaze dried, I added some pieces of colored glass and covered it all with a clear glaze.


OK, filled up the kiln and will let it fire tonight. Hopefully, treasures will await me tomorrow! It will probably take 9 hours to fire about 70 tiles.