I love discovering new techniques. New to me that is – if it sounds Japanese, it’s likely thousands of years old!
Mishima is a way of inlaying clay in clay. You draw or carve an image into leather hard clay, fill the carving with coloured slip, and then scrape back the surface so you get a neat line in the clay.
Sounds simple. I tried the version where you use shellac or wax resist to seal the surface before you carve, and then the excess slip just wipes away! Simple, right? Pah.
Obviously, I knew better, so had my flat clay, less than leather hard, and did the inlay on that before I used a former to press them into shape. But each time I added slip the clay got wetter and less stable, and I wiped the inlay away time and time again. I thought it would be easier to carve on the flat. Turns out it just didn’t work unless the base is leather hard.
So I scraped back and used the former to make the dishes and remade some of the missing lines Then I left it overnight and it turns out that that Mishima works nearly as well on dry clay as it does leather hard. Remade the grooves where I had lost them here’s what I have left.
The blue here is 1/2 teaspoon of powder in a small jar of slip, so I will need to fire it to see how dark it goes.