Handmade Tile is a contemporary guide for ceramic artists and anyone interested in custom tile installations—from making, designing, and decorating to designing your space and installation. No matter how many years of experience you have as a ceramic artist or how many home-improvement projects you've tackled, nothing prepares you for the unique world of ceramic tile. From concept and design, through firing and installation, ceramic tiling is one of the few places in a home where art is permanently installed as a feature of a room. In Handmade Tile, Forrest Lesch-Middelton shares everything he's learned as the founder and owner of the custom tile business FLM Ceramics and Tile. From his years as a one-man operation to his current production facility, Forrest has seen it all and helps you every step of the way. Whether you want to make your own tile, or want to use artistic and custom-made tile in your home, this book has everything you need. Key features of the book include: Making Tile: key tools, rolling, cutting, extruding Decorating: glazes, image transfer, cuerda seca, underglaze, slip Designing Your Space: tile in context, choosing your tile, codes and standards Installation: removing old tile, backing, preparing surfaces, setting, grouting Galleries and interviews with today's top workings artists in tile round out the package. Featured artists include Allison Bloom, Boris Aldridge, Disc Interiors, PV Tile, and more.

Text and photographs show how to design and fabricate flat and relief tiles, decorate and fire the tiles, install the finished tiles, and much more.

Creating handmade decorator tiles can be fun and easy! This friendly approach to making handmade ceramic tiles demonstrates how to design, fire, and decorate stunning tiles and provides ideas for creatively utilizing them in the home. More than 200 photos guide readers through each step of the creation process and then into four projects: culinary tiles, twig tiles, house numbers, and a mirror. Suitable for every skill level, this book also contains inspiration and insight from established artists from around the country. • Detailed instructions, photographs, and illustrations ensure success • Includes diverse designs and inspiration from artists throughout the country

Contains creative techniques for a number of ceramic tile projects with detailed information and instruction on basic tools and materials, glaze application, and techniques for making slab tiles.

A comprehensive, full-color exploration of tile art and production worldwide, from earliest times to the present day. The book is both an authoritative work of reference and a visual delight, ranging from ancient Greece, where the first fired roof tiles date from as early as the third millennium BC, to twentieth-century Mexico. Along the way we encounter stunning examples of the tiler's art: the enormous English medieval floor pavements from Byland Abbey and Clarendon Palace; figural tiles from China, intended to adorn roofs and ward off evil; the famous Iznik tiles from the Islamic world, with their richly decorative patterns; the highly stylised ceramic tiles of the Arts and Crafts movement; and the tiles created by some of the finest ceramic artists and potters of the twenty-first century. Placing the tiles firmly in their historical and cultural context, the book highlights both continuity and diversity, the dissemination of techniques and designs, and how tile art in one time and place has inspired and rejuvenated those in others. Tiles are also studied in terms of function as well as form, and the full range of architectural and practical purposes for which they have been used - from floors to roofs, stoves to bathrooms, cathedrals to metro stations - will be explored, along with the various techniques employed to create such versatile pieces. 5000 Years of Tiles is the essential, most comprehensive single volume for anyone interested in the ceramic, decorative, and architectural arts.

Spurred on by the marketplace and welcomed by architects and designers seeking to personalize their creations, hundreds of studio tile artists and makers are successfully producing tile today throughout the United States. Among the most revered of these is Motawi Tileworks of Ann Arbor, Michigan, founded by Nawal Motawi and her brother Karim in 1992. Today Motawi Tileworks, under their combined leadership, occupies a spacious studio in a natural setting west of town, where thirty people are employed. Far more than a prosperous and expanding enterprise, Motawi has become a symbol of artistic sensibility and success in the tile industry. The key to Motawi's astounding progress lies in part in Nawal's artistic achievement-a blend of original art inspired and flavored by her interpretation of historic precedents. The result in her finished work reflects the past while being well suited to contemporary taste. The combination of color and design is striking and distinctly Motawi, clearly recognized as such throughout the country. In museum shops, high-end gift stores, and tile showrooms from coast to coast, Motawi stands out for both the quality of the design and the exquisite workmanship.

From the world's foremost collector, here is the new, fully illustrated standard guide to America's first golden age of tile making. American Art Tile presents more than 2,000 tiles, arranged geographically and chronologically, made by more than 100 American potteries and manufacturers from the Civil War to the 194Os. Full-color photographs illustrate these collectible and rare tiles from all regions of the United States, as well as historic landmark tile installations, from the New York subway to Catalina Island. Tile collectors will appreciate the meticulously researched history of each pottery, biographies of tile makers, and rare examples (seldom seen even in museums) from little-known potteries in Norman Karlson's personal collection.