The Beginner's Guide to Decorating Pottery: An Introduction to Glazes, Patterns, Inlay, Luster, and Dimensional Designs (Volume 3) (Essential Ceramics Skills, 3)

This is the best book on beginner pottery I've bought. The explanations are detailed, insightful and show true expertise. They're also easy to follow. And the photos are stunning.

Decent, definitely caters to a beginner. Not necessarily a complete novice, maybe someone who just got interested in ceramics enough to sign up for a beginner throwing/wheel class but art has always been a hobby of interest for them. And also is 2-3 weeks away from beginning the glazing part of the process.For context, I'm speaking someone who isn't new to making art, has done ceramics in the distant past in school before but never delved into the medium, and just happened to have finished a beginner wheel class a few days ago w/ my very beginner non-art background partner.Intro is "Yeah, that's right. You are an artist!" hype up and some of Emily's background and views on ceramics. This is accessible for young people and new students. Felt a bit juvenile to me as this established the vanilla "teaching a hobbyist" vibe for me..I find some of the tools section to be more catering to someone considering starting their own studio which I find pretty unlikely for someone in the beginner audience for this book. More likely they're a part of a communal studio be it a local business or your school's. I think there's a lot to know about the pros and cons of this and the restrictions those might impart and how to take advantage of this experience.For example, there's a lot of talk of multiple clay types, tools, gilding, etc yet since my local studio (which caters mostly to beginners) only uses white clay (various clay types in a communal studio seems to be too messy to risk tainting other people's work) so knowing this possibility is something I think very important to inform a beginner of. Also the toxic gilding fluid in firing means they probably won't allow in their kiln, where things are constantly firing and people are always present, and to not necessarily get your hopes up etc.Also no discussion of actual $ amount costs of things, I understand with inflation this can date a book but honestly a ballpark, even keeping the year in mind, would be helpful.My favorite part is seeing (albeit brief, occasional, 2-4 photos on a few pages) featuring of other people's work. Her art style is a bit minimal in a cutesy contemporary way for my personal liking.Overall, the information is vague enough to be pretty unuseful to me even though I consider myself a beginner to ceramics. I find I get more information from videos online, being able to SEE the process while simultaneous hearing the artist speak.Although image heavy, it's also got big chunks of large font text that I eventually just begin skimming because it was friendly and informal in a way that I felt like I was reading a YT video. This makes me wish there was a video version of the book that came with this while still having this physical book to refer back to whenever I want/need to recall something heard in the video.

The Beginner's Guide to Decorating Pottery: An Introduction to Glazes, Patterns, Inlay, Luster, and Dimensional Designs (Volume 3) (Essential Ceramics Skills, 3)First impressions: Nice paperback book, the binding is good. The printing is clear and the colors are bright. The pictures are in focus and the pages are thick and well made.Installation/setup: Open book and read to learn about pottery glazes and other ways to decorate clay works.Final thoughts: I am just getting back into doing pottery after a bit of time away. I am slowly acquiring the tools I need to get back into making my own clay creations. I haven’t done this since high school and I am just doing it for fun and maybe a bit of physical therapy. I like this book, I’m glad I got it for reference. It is very informative and I can’t wait to try some of the techniques listed in this book. I like it and I’m glad I got it.⭐️1 star - I don't recommend it at all, poor quality.⭐️⭐️ 2 stars - I don't recommend it, it has multiple faults, or a very high price.⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3 stars - It's passable, It has some faults but the quality is ok for what it is.⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 stars - Product quite acceptable, it does what it promises.⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 5 stars - Product that I totally recommend.

This book takes us way way way back to art class and to spending the better part of a summer learning how to throw a pot on a wheel, how to make slab and coil pottery. Our only choices for decorating the pottery we made were a few basic glazes in a few very basic colors. Nice enough to take home, nice enough to hold pencils or candy, but really no creativity involved. We also had no idea how much "doing" pottery as an art form cost. And never were able to take another pottery class.Many many years later, we're beginning to toy with the idea of getting into pottery as a retirement endeavor. And there are a few pottery studios in the area where one can go and pay for firing and use of the space...sooo, we're beginning to dream. And this book is a "Sears Dreambook" for people who would like to do some out of the ordinary work with ceramics. It doesn't hurt that the photography is absolutely stunning. And there are sooooooo many ideas, and they're all explained in a way an absolute beginner won't feel overwhelmed.Our only criticism of the book is that the first 28 pages of the book is more of an inspirational first lecture on ceramics, why one creates pottery, how the artist got to where they are. This seems more appropriate for the first book in a series than one that seems to be the third in a series.

This book is very attractive and has many beautiful photos inside. It is broken up into different sections, each focused on an aspect of decorating pottery. Around the third section, it explains that the book is not for total beginners, but those who already have some understanding of the craft. That being said, this book is something I would have to work up to. I still enjoyed reading about the techniques and I especially enjoyed the last section, which includes step-by-step instructions for projects.