Plants purchased in plastic nursery containers can be placed in a new pot as soon as they arrive home. After months in a little growing pot, your new plant has most certainly outgrown it and would benefit from larger housing of new wholesale ceramic pots. Any of your mature houseplants that have outgrown their container are also eligible for a container update. With so many approaches available and so many designs out there, choosing the design and style of the pottery can be difficult for the uninitiated to figure out how a pot’s many varied marks and patterns were accomplished, to recognise specific techniques, and to retain the names and processes behind them. To get you started, here’s a quick breakdown of the most prevalent types of pot decoration:
1. Brush Painted
Brushes have been used to stylise pots for generations worldwide, spanning the gap between fine art, handmade pottery, and classical calligraphy. Colour can be put to the pot’s surface by dipping a brush into the slip – a slurry of clay and water which contains a pigment, such as the rust-red of iron oxide – to contrast with the natural clay or an underglaze.
Subtle, delicate lines or wide, flowing strokes can be formed depending on the brush head’s width and the bristles’ length, giving potters a wide range of effects. Brushwork can provide a pot with a true feeling of movement and energy when done correctly.
2. Swiping with your fingers
Potters commonly use their fingers to pull through wet slip as decorating, similar to combing but much coarser in appearance. Fingers and thumbs can be used to spread slip to a pot. Planters with finger swipe markings are particularly lovely to own because you can trace your fingertips over and through the original marks left by the potter. You can gain a sense of the movement they employed in their design and make your attachment with that pot feel keenly personal and intimate.
3. Combing
Combing is a method of creating parallel lines on a pot’s exterior by running an instrument through the clay or swiping a wet slip to reveal the clay underneath. Potters have used various tools to comb in the past, including carved bone and ivory, prongs, and probably the first ornamental slipware tool, birds’ feathers, which have a softer and more natural look than the rigidity and clarity of a metal prong.
4. Paddling
Paddling is an ‘impressing’ type that includes decorating a bare clay surface with etched designs on wooden boards or paddles. One hand holds the pot steady while the other firmly strikes the surface with the paddle, leaving a geometric marking behind.
Paddling makes extensive use of glaze that accumulates within the contour sections of the pattern, in addition to the apparent benefit of treating much larger areas more equally than smaller, individual imprints. A deeper, crystal-like surface appears on the borders of the pattern where the glaze accumulates, producing a lovely contrast across the planter.
Artistic work displayed on pots and planters can be a beautiful aesthetic uplift to your space and support local artisans and wholesale ceramic pots. Whilst potters have continued to replicate many of the old and traditional designs on their pots and planters, most techniques’ flexibility also allows today’s modern potters to create a range of beautiful and heartwarming effects, resulting in more vibrant, abstract designs.
