Decoration, Panels, and Packaging

Abstract

Sand-coated surfaces are a type of decoration applied to face bricks, and they can be provided in nearly every color imaginable. The soft-mud process requires a coating of sand for forming, but this necessity is exploited to produce bricks of a variety of colors—very often copying the appearance of antique, hand-molded products. Sanded surfaces are also widely used on stiff-mud bricks, simulating the appearance of soft-mud bricks. This type of decoration, as well as all other types, can be produced in such a wide range of colors that chromatology will not be discussed extensively in this chapter. The colors produced by the control of the oxidation state of iron was discussed at length in Chapt. 6. Other transition-element oxides and previously prepared pigments are subject to the same basic principles. Our considerations of the decoration of structural clay products will be involved largely with textural appearances.