Once man began building homes and public facilities, he decided he wanted to liven the space up a bit. Ceramic painting became an efficient way to decorate the inside of a building. It was used on deck walls, ceilings, floors, murals and even on outside walls. This idea of decoration is so old that ceramic tile paintings have been found at the ruins of Babylon, ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. The oldest paintings were found in Babylon and are estimated to be 4,000 years old.
Very few techniques were ever documented throughout the history of ceramic painting. They were passed down orally from father to son or from master to student. It is evident that the tiles themselves were made of clay by hand. The earliest tiles were made of clay bricks that were flattened and shaped by hand then dried by the sun or baked. Later on, wood tools were used to shape the clay. After the body was shaped, the tile was fired in a kiln. If the tile was unglazed, it was fired once. If it was glazed, then it was fired twice. In the 1840s artists began to revive the art of ceramic painting and created bricks using a "dust pressing" method. This method pressed the brick between two metal slabs.
Unglazed tiles were uncolored and kept to the color of the clay. A very early style of decoration was sgraffito. Sgraffito is a technique where the body is covered with slip and then scratched off to form an image. A clear glaze--created by grinding white lead, flint, china stone and china clay together--brought out the color of the clay or of the paint applied over the clay. This glaze allowed artists to paint freely on the clay and enabled the paint to stay on the clay. The ancient Greeks made popular a style of ceramic painting called mosaic. This method involves cutting out colored tile pieces then putting them together to form a picture or design.
Three forms of decoration were used on ceramic. An early form of design, used in ancient times, was the tile picture. Each brick contained a piece of a picture, then bricks were pieced together to from one large picture formed of tiles. The bricks were usually painted in color and glazed. Single motifs were tiles with one isolated figure painted upon them. Ceramic was also painted with geometric patterns. Most pattern designs required four tiles to complete a design.
Throughout the history of ceramic painting, tiles were created in a variety of shapes. Many early tiles were irregular and unsymmetrical in order for them to fit together. After a while, artists began using diamond or octagonal, pentagonal or triangular shapes. It was not until the 13th century that artists began to favor square- or rectangular-shaped tiles.