Illustration of a mural of tiles with a graphical line pattern. The background is lightly rosé with earth tones.

Ceramic tiles and sea creatures

I constantly look up pottery videos and search for classes, but the idea always goes to my “someday” category plan.

Luckily, or maybe this is my subconscious pulling its strings, I found a way to work with this material for my thesis – and I will talk about that in future posts.

I bought a couple of different brands of air-dry clay, which looks like the traditional pottery clay but are made of paper, glue and other mysterious stuff. I started modelling while watching a series on Netflix, and it was pretty therapeutic.

I used one of those to prototype an idea. It didn’t work, but I think it can look cool for a wall art piece once I paint it and apply a layer of varnish.

Tile test 12x12cm.

The tile is part of the mural in the featured image of this post. I wanted to try out a tile, and, honestly, I did overengineer a 3d printed mould that didn’t entirely work out to produce it.

The inspiration for this pattern is the L-systems coding, a mathematical system used to describe the growth of plants and sea creatures. I used a grasshopper script and made some loops with anemone to make it.

Ernst Haeckel Book full of wonderful sea creatures illustrations.

Sea creatures are also a theme I recently got in a giant rabbit hole. I even found this book with fantastic illustrations and couldn’t prevent myself from buying it (I know, totally guilty, but I swear I will make cute illustrations based on this!).

Quick look inside. I will definetely use it for inspiration.