Hand building
Ceramic tiles that stay flat
A tile is the simplest thing in the building to make and one of the hardest to make well, because a flat square of clay is the shape most determined to stop being flat. It curls at the edges, it cracks across the middle, and it does most of that quietly overnight while you are at home. Almost none of that is bad luck. It is a short list of causes, and every one of them has a fix you can do at the table.
The short version
All of it, in six lines
- A tile curls toward whichever face dries first. The top is open to the air and the bottom is sitting on a board, so the top wins, and the edges lift. Everything below is a way of evening that out.
- Roll it thicker than feels right. Three eighths of an inch, half an inch if it is bigger than about eight inches across. Thin tiles warp. Every time.
- Rib both faces hard, in two directions. This is the step people skip and it is the one that matters most. Do the back as thoroughly as the front.
- Cut on the board you are going to dry on, and then stop touching it. Lifting, sliding and flipping a wet tile stretches it, and clay remembers being stretched.
- Dry it slowly, with both faces losing water at the same speed. Sandwich it between two flat boards overnight, then move it to a rack once it is stiff.
- Glaze the top only. Wipe the back and the bottom edge bone clean or it welds itself to the kiln shelf.
How to use this page
Why there is a video and a list for the same thing
Watching somebody rib a slab tells you things writing cannot. How much pressure they actually use. How many passes. How the surface changes under the tool. Six seconds of video does what six paragraphs cannot.
Reading does the opposite job. It gives you the order of operations, the numbers, and the reason a step exists, and it sits still on a screen while your hands are covered in clay. Nobody has ever successfully scrubbed back through a twenty minute video with a wet thumb to find the part about which way to rotate the slab.
There is decent evidence that the two together stick better than either one alone. Watching gives you the picture of what it should look like. Reading it as a list gives you something to rehearse and check yourself against. Put both in front of somebody and the video stops being a thing they watched and starts being a thing they can do.
So this page is built to be used twice. Watch a clip once, all the way through, before you touch clay. Then leave the lists open on your phone at the table. Every list here is short enough to hold in your head between glances, and there is a copy button further down that drops the whole thing into your notes app.
The one idea
A tile curls toward whichever face dries first
Clay shrinks as it loses water. A tile has two big faces, and they almost never lose water at the same rate, because one of them is open to the room and the other is lying on a board. The face that dries first gets smaller first, and a sheet that is smaller on one side than the other cannot stay flat. It has to bend. That is the whole mechanism, and every rule further down this page is a way of taking it away.
- The top face is wide open. Air moves across it all night, so it gives up water fastest and starts shrinking first.
- The edges dry from three directions at once. Top, side and a little underneath. They stiffen long before the middle does, which is why cracks start at an edge and run inward.
- The bottom face is sealed against the board. It is still holding water hours after the top has gone stiff. Now you have one sheet with two different sizes.
- So the edges lift. The shorter face pulls the longer one around, and the tile becomes a very shallow dish. It looks fine wet and appears in the morning.
- Once it lifts, it gets worse fast. The lifted edge now has air underneath it too, so it dries even quicker, and the curl feeds itself.
The second cause: clay remembers being stretched
Clay particles are flat, like a stack of playing cards. Rolling lines them all up in the direction you rolled, and when the water leaves they try to twist back toward where they were. Potters call it clay memory. It is why a slab that was rolled hard in one direction curls along that direction, and it is why lifting, sliding and stretching a wet tile comes back to bite you two days later.
The more plastic the clay, the more memory it has. Grog and sand break up that alignment, which is exactly why a grogged body is easier to keep flat than a silky one.
Step zero
Pick a clay that wants to behave
More of this is decided at the clay shelf than anywhere else. Two numbers matter. How much the body shrinks, because shrinkage is the force that bends a tile, and how much grog is in it, because grog interrupts the particle alignment that stores the curl. The number on each row is the published shrinkage from wet to fired, and it is a planning guide rather than gospel.
| Clay body | Shrinkage | What that means for a tile |
|---|---|---|
| 52 Buff | 10.0% | The lowest shrinkage in the building and the cheapest bag on the shelf. Slightly coarse, which is a virtue here. This is the one to make your first tiles in. |
| Berlin Gray | About 12% | A dark gray stoneware with a very fine grog running through it, and that grog is exactly what keeps a slab honest while it dries. Structurally the best-behaved slab clay we stock. |
| B-Mix | 12.0% | Smooth and near-porcelain. It ribs to a beautiful surface, which matters on something you are going to look at flat-on, but it holds more memory than a grogged body. Compress it properly and it is fine. |
| Speckled Buff | 12.0% | Warm and smooth with the desert-brown speckle coming through the glaze. Behaves well flat and looks good with very little decoration on it. |
| B-Mix w/Specks | 12.5% | Lovely clay. The manufacturer says outright that it wants slow drying and plenty of compression, which happens to be the entire list of things a tile needs anyway. |
| #16 Porcelain | 13.9% | The most shrinkage and the most memory in the building. It will find every uneven spot in your slab and it is unforgiving about wall thickness. Beautiful for tiles, and not for your first ones. |
| B-Mix w/Grog | Not published | We do not have a published number on our shelf for this one. It has grog in it, which is the property you want, so treat it as a good tile clay and expect it to sit somewhere near B-Mix. |
| Half & Half | Not published | Half porcelain, half stoneware. No published number here either. Plenty of people build flat work in it, but it is not where we would point somebody making a first tile. |
is the shortcut
If you only remember one thing from this table, remember that the gritty clays stay flatter than the silky ones. 52 Buff and Berlin Gray are the two easiest tile clays we carry, for that reason and no other.
beats softer
Wetter clay holds more water, and every drop of it has to leave before the tile is done. Work from a bag that has firmed up a little rather than one straight off the pallet, and you have removed some of the shrinkage before you start.
for the whole set
Tiles that live next to each other need to end up the same size. Two different clay bodies shrink by different amounts, so a set built from scraps of three bags comes out of the kiln not quite matching.
Every clay body we carry, with what it costs at your Level, is on the clay collection page. Clay has to be bought through us. Outside clay can destroy a kiln, so please do not bring any.
Step one
Roll it thicker than feels right
Thin tiles warp. That is not a tendency, it is close to a law, and it is the single most common reason a first set of tiles comes out of the kiln looking like potato chips. A thin sheet has almost no stiffness to resist the pull of one face shrinking faster than the other, so it goes wherever the drying tells it to go.
Tiles up to about eight inches
Wet-clay thickness, measured before it dries. This is the everyday number and it is what you want for coasters, trivets and small wall tiles.
Anything bigger than that
The wider the tile, the further the edges are from the middle, and the more leverage the curl has. Big tiles need the extra stiffness.
Where it becomes a coin toss
You can make a quarter-inch tile stay flat. You will just be fighting for it the whole way, and some of them will still lose.
Eight moves at the slab roller
Five moves at the slab roller
- Wedge it properly first. An air pocket in a tile is a soft spot, and a soft spot dries at a different speed to everything around it. Wedging is also what randomizes the particles before the roller lines them all up again.
- Cut a block a little bigger than you think. Trimmings get wedged up and go straight back in your bag, so there is no reason to be careful here.
- Start the bar high and come down in small steps. About three inches to begin, which is roughly the height of your block, then a little lower each pass. If the wheel is suddenly hard to turn, you dropped it too far. Raise it and take smaller bites.
- Read the gauge in eighths, not quarters. The big marks are quarter inches and the small ones between them are eighths. Almost everybody reads them all as quarters on their first go and lands nowhere near the thickness they wanted.
- Rotate the slab ninety degrees between passes. Clay only stretches side to side as you look at the machine, never front to back. Rotating spreads the particle alignment around instead of running it all one way, and that is the difference between a slab with a curl built into it and one without.
- Flip the slab over at least once. It helps it release cleanly, and it means neither face has been stretched more than the other.
- Send the last pass through both directions. Set your real thickness, remembering the mats are in the gap too, so you land a shade under the number on the gauge.
- Peel the mat back slowly. Lift the top one straight off, then roll the bottom one back away from the clay. Yanking the clay off the mat stretches the whole slab, and a stretched slab is a warped tile you have not met yet.
- Wedge it, then cut a block a little bigger than you think. Trimmings go straight back in your bag.
- Start the bar around three inches and come down a little at a time. Read the gauge in eighths, not quarters. If the wheel goes hard to turn, raise it and take smaller bites.
- Rotate ninety degrees between passes and flip it over once. Clay only stretches side to side, so rotating is what stops the curl being built in.
- Send the final pass through both directions. The mats are in the gap too, so you land a shade under the gauge number.
- Peel the mat back slowly instead of pulling the clay. Yanking stretches the slab, and a stretched slab is a warped tile you have not met yet.
No roller at all is a real option
A rolling pin and two wooden guide sticks of the right thickness will give you a beautifully even slab, and because you are working in short strokes from several directions rather than one long squeeze, it can build in less directional memory than a machine does. It is slower. For four tiles it is not slower enough to matter.
Both of our slab rollers are open to every Level and both will roll a slab up to thirty inches. Certification on the slab rollers and slab molds comes first and is required before you use either. Get certified here.
Step two, and the important one
Rib both faces, in two directions
If you do one thing on this page, do this one. Rolling leaves the clay loosely packed and lined up in the direction it travelled. Compressing it with a rib pushes those particles back together and knocks the alignment out of them, which is both what stops the curl and what stops the cracks. It takes about ninety seconds a side and it is the step almost everybody skips because the slab already looks finished.
- Rib the top face firmly, corner to corner. Hold the rib at a low angle and use real pressure. You are not smoothing it, you are squashing it. Work across the whole surface, not just the middle.
- Now do it again at ninety degrees to the first pass. One direction only re-aligns the particles a different way. Two crossing directions is what actually randomizes them.
- Flip the slab and do exactly the same to the back. The back is the face nobody sees and it is doing half the work of holding the tile flat. A tile compressed on one side only is a tile that curls toward the other side.
- Keep it dry. A wet sponge or a wet rib puts water straight back into the surface you just closed up, and that surface then dries faster than the rest of the tile. Barely damp, or nothing at all.
A hard rib and a soft rib do different jobs
A metal or hard plastic rib is what compresses. A soft red rib is what smooths and follows a curve. For a flat tile you want the hard one for the two crossing passes, and then the soft one only if you want the surface polished afterwards. Doing it in the other order undoes the compression you just put in.
Green Level Members bring their own tools. Every other Level uses the studio ribs, and there are plenty of both kinds.
How you know you did enough
The surface changes. A rolled slab has a slightly open, slightly furry look to it. A compressed one goes tight and faintly sheened, and the rib starts to skate instead of drag. When the tool stops finding anything to push, you are done.
Step three
Cut on the board you will dry on
Here is the move that separates people whose tiles come out flat from people whose tiles come out interesting. Get the slab onto its final board before you cut anything, and then do not pick the tiles up again until they are stiff. Every lift, slide and rescue in between is a stretch, and the clay is keeping score.
- Get the slab onto its board in one move. Peel the roller mat back onto the board and let the slab arrive flat, or carry it on the mat and roll it off. What you are avoiding is picking a floppy wet sheet up by two corners.
- Cut a paper or card template first. Cut the template until it is right, then cut clay once. Cutting clay repeatedly to fix a size is how a tile ends up with four different edges.
- Hold the blade vertical. A tilted cut leaves a feathered edge that is thinner than the rest of the tile, so it dries first, and it becomes the crack. Straight down, one pass, all the way through.
- Leave a gap between tiles. Cut them apart with a real space between each one rather than butting them up. They shrink toward their own middles as they dry and neighbours that touch will drag on each other.
- Lift the waste away, not the tiles. Peel the offcut lattice off the board and leave the tiles exactly where they are. This is the entire reason you cut on the drying board.
- Tidy the edges now, gently. A light chamfer with a rib or a dry finger takes the sharpness off. Save any real edge work for leather hard, when the tile can take being handled.
- Sign the back now. Stamping a bone-dry tile is how you crack it. Do it while the clay still gives, and press with a finger underneath supporting the spot.
Matching tiles are a measuring problem, not a cutting problem
If the finished set has to fit a space, work backwards from the fired size. A tile in a body that shrinks 12% needs to be cut about an eighth larger per inch of finished width, and it is easier to add a grout gap than to make the tiles bigger later. Our shrinkage calculator does the arithmetic if you would rather not.
Step four, and the slow one
Dry them evenly, and dry them boringly
Every drying setup you will ever read about is answering one question
Are both faces of this tile losing water at the same speed? That is it. Drywall, plywood, plastic sheeting, cookie racks, weights, flipping, wrapping. Every one of them is somebody's answer to that one question. Once you can ask it about whatever is in front of you, you do not need to memorize anybody's method, including ours.
Night one: put a lid on it
The first eight to twelve hours decide most of it.
Lay a second flat board straight on top of the tiles, so each one is sandwiched between two surfaces that pull water at the same rate from both sides. Now neither face can get ahead of the other. Drywall is the traditional choice because it drinks fast. Plywood works and is gentler. A plain bat or a smooth ware board is fine.
Overnight is usually right. By morning the tiles should be close to leather hard and stiff enough to lift without flexing. That is the test: pick one up by an edge, and if it bends at all, put it back and give it longer.
- Weight it, but barely. Enough to hold the tiles down, not enough to stop them shrinking. A tile that cannot pull inward as it shrinks will crack instead of curl, and you have traded one problem for a worse one.
- Seal drywall edges with tape. Loose drywall dust in your clay is a problem you meet in the kiln, not tonight.
- Same-size boards. A top board that only covers half the tiles gives you a beautiful demonstration of everything on this page, in one batch.
- Cool and out of the draft. Not near a door, not near a heater, not in the sun.
Day two: flip once, then leave them
One flip, at leather hard, and no more handling after it.
Once they are stiff, turn each tile over. The face that was against the board gets its turn at the air, and the face that has been drying gets a rest. One flip is usually all it needs, and it is now safe because a leather-hard tile does not stretch when you lift it.
This is also the moment for edge work. A rasp, a rib or a damp fingertip, and any chamfer or bevel you want on the edges. Do it now and you never have to touch the tile again.
- Lift with two hands, flat. Not by one corner. A leather-hard tile is strong in its own plane and weak across it.
- Check it on something flat. Set it on the table and press one corner. If it rocks, it is warped, and this is the last hour you can do anything about it. Press it gently flat under the top board again and give it another night.
- Sand or scrape the back flat. A high spot on the back becomes a rocker on a finished coaster.
Then: air on all sides
Once it cannot bend, the fastest even drying is no board at all.
Move the tiles to an open wire rack, propped so air reaches the top, the bottom and all four edges at once. Now every surface is drying at the same speed by default rather than by arrangement, which is the cleanest possible answer to the question at the top of this section.
Leave them until they are properly bone dry. Room temperature, not cool to the touch, and no darker patch anywhere. A tile that goes into a bisque with water still in it is the one that comes out in pieces.
- Do not stand them on edge yet. Standing a tile on one edge dries that edge slower than the rest and can put a gentle bow into it.
- Give them the extra day. Tiles are thick for their size and they hold water longer than they look like they should.
- Do not speed it up. No heater, no fan, no sunny windowsill. Every fast-drying trick is a warping trick wearing a disguise.
- Night one, sandwich them. A flat board straight on top of the tiles, so both faces lose water at the same rate. Barely any weight. Cool spot, out of the draft.
- Morning, test one. Lift a tile by an edge. If it flexes, put it back for longer. If it is stiff, you are at leather hard.
- Flip each one once, then finish the edges. Two hands, flat. Check it does not rock, and press it back under the board for another night if it does.
- Move them to an open rack until bone dry. Air on all sides, all four edges. No heater, no fan, no sunny window.
The honest part
Tiles take longer than you want them to. A half-inch tile in a cool room can want the better part of a week to reach genuinely bone dry, and the whole point of this section is that you cannot buy that time back with a fan. If you are on a deadline, the fix is to start earlier or make the tile thinner and accept more risk, not to dry it harder.
Everything about drying pottery in general, not just tiles, is in the kiln firing guide, which explains what the water is actually doing in there.
Step five
Fire them flat, on something flat
A tile that came out of the drying rack perfectly flat can still come out of a kiln bowed, because clay softens as it approaches temperature. At cone 5½ a stoneware body is close to glass. Whatever it is resting on at that moment, it will politely copy.
Lay them flat, always
Never on edge, never leaning, never propped. A tile fires face up on a shelf and nothing else. Bisque is free here, so there is no reason to crowd them.
Check the shelf under it
A crumb of kiln wash or an old glaze drip becomes a permanent bump in the back of your tile, and around it the tile will lift. Run a hand over the spot before you set anything down.
Glaze the top face only
The back and the bottom edge come to us bone clean. Glaze on the underside of a flat tile is the most reliable way there is to weld a piece to a kiln shelf.
Leave a dry margin at the edge
Wipe the last little strip of the side clean as well. Glaze creeps downward as it melts, and on a tile it only has an eighth of an inch to travel before it reaches the shelf.
Use a cookie if you are unsure
A kiln cookie under the tile catches anything that runs and protects the shelf. With a flowing glaze on a flat surface, it is cheap insurance.
Bone dry, genuinely
Bisque runs to cone 05 and it drives the last water out fast. A tile that still has moisture in the middle can crack straight across on the way up.
What a tile costs to fire, said plainly
Bisque firings are free, every time. Glaze firings run five cents per cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum, and the calculator works one piece at a time. A six inch tile at three eighths thick is about thirteen cubic inches, which is roughly seventy cents of glaze firing, so every tile you make lands on that $4.80 minimum instead. Nine small tiles is nine minimums.
That is worth knowing before you plan a backsplash. It is not a reason to skip the project, it is a reason to make the tiles a bit bigger and use fewer of them, and to price it out on the firing calculator before you roll thirty slabs.
Step six
Glazing something flat is a different sport
Every glaze problem on a pot comes from gravity pulling melted glass down a vertical wall. On a tile that force is pointing straight into the surface instead of down it, which changes almost everything about how a glaze behaves, mostly in your favor.
- Runny glazes stop being frightening. The glazes that are too mobile to trust on a mug sit still and pool beautifully on a tile. This is the place to use the ones you have been avoiding.
- Thickness variation shows more, not less. A flat surface lit from the side is unforgiving. Two even coats beat one heavy one, and brush each coat at right angles to the last.
- Brushing beats dipping here. Dipping a flat tile gives you a puddle on the way out and a thick lip along whichever edge came out last. Brush-on gives you control, and most of our glazes are brush-on by design.
- Underglaze is at its best on tile. No curve to fight, no rim to work around. If you want to draw on something, this is the surface.
- Wipe the back with a damp sponge at the end. Not the beginning. Glaze dust migrates while you work, and the back only has to be clean at the moment you hand it in.
- A tile is a test tile. That is not a joke. If you are going to make twelve of something, glaze one first, fire it, and look at it before you commit the other eleven.
Our full glaze and underglaze collection, and which ones your Level reaches, is on the glaze finder. The rules for underglaze specifically are on the underglaze guide.
Bare clay is a finish too
Speckled Buff and Berlin Gray both fire to a surface a lot of people prefer naked, and a tile with a glazed panel in the middle and a bare border around it looks deliberate in a way that a fully glazed one often does not. It also removes the entire edge problem.
Two people making real tiles, start to finish
Both of these are long. Both are worth it if you are about to commit a weekend to a real project rather than four coasters.
Keep this open
The whole thing, on one screen
At the roller
- Grogged clay, stiff clay. 52 Buff or Berlin Gray for a first set.
- Three eighths of an inch. Half an inch over eight inches wide.
- Rotate ninety degrees between passes, and flip it once.
- Read the gauge in eighths, not quarters.
- Peel the mat off the clay, never the clay off the mat.
At the table
- Rib the top hard, twice, the second pass crossing the first.
- Flip and rib the back the same. Skipping this is the number one cause of a curl.
- Get it onto its drying board before you cut. Then stop lifting it.
- Blade vertical, one pass. A slanted cut is a thin edge and a thin edge is a crack.
- Gaps between tiles, and lift away the waste, not the tiles.
- Sign the back now, while the clay still gives.
Drying and firing
- Flat board on top overnight. Barely any weight on it.
- Flip once at leather hard, then finish the edges and leave it alone.
- Open rack until bone dry. No heater, no fan, no window.
- Check it does not rock before it goes in for bisque.
- Glaze the top face only. Back and bottom edge wiped clean.
- Flat on a clean shelf. Never on edge, never leaning.
Diagnosis
Six ways it goes wrong, and what caused it
Three ways it goes wrong
Every one of these has a cause you can name, which means every one of them has something you can do differently next time.
The edges lifted into a shallow dish
The classic. The top face dried faster than the bottom and pulled the edges up with it. Nearly always a tile that dried uncovered on a single board.
A crack straight across the middle
The edges stiffened while the middle was still shrinking, so the middle pulled against a rim that had stopped moving. Under-compressed clay tears first, and a heavy weight on top makes it worse by stopping the tile sliding as it shrinks.
It welded itself to the kiln shelf
Glaze on the back, or glaze that reached the bottom edge and crept down during the melt. On a tile there is almost no distance for it to travel.
The corners cracked or snapped off
A corner dries from three directions at once and reaches bone dry while the middle of the tile is still leather hard. Sharp square corners are the most exposed shape on the whole piece.
Flat out of the bisque, bowed out of the glaze fire
At cone 5½ the body goes soft and copies whatever it is lying on. A thin tile has the least resistance to that, and a crumb on the shelf gives it something to copy.
The surface came out rippled and wavy
Clay that was too soft, or a roller bar dropped too far in one pass so the slab got squeezed rather than rolled. Both leave the surface stretched unevenly, and drying reveals it.
Can a warped tile be saved?
At leather hard, sometimes. Press it flat under a board for another night and it may relax. At bone dry, no. Fired, definitely not. This is a problem that is only solvable while the clay still moves, which is why everything above happens before the kiln does.
If a tile came out of a glaze firing fused or with a sharp foot, we have a whole page on fixing fused and sharp pottery.
Here specifically
What applies to tiles at The Clay Hole
None of this is unusual. It is worth having in one place before you plan anything bigger than a coaster.
- Certification comes first Both slab rollers and the slab molds need you signed off before you use them. It takes one sitting and it is on this page.
- Both rollers are open to every Level Green, Yellow, Purple and Black. Both machines will roll a slab up to thirty inches, which is a lot of tiles in one pass.
- Green Level Members bring their own tools Every other Level uses the studio ribs, and there are plenty of hard and soft ones. A hard rib is the one that matters here.
- Clay comes from us In 25 lb bags, with a discount at Yellow, Purple and Black Level. Outside clay can destroy a kiln, so please do not bring any.
- Bisque is free, glaze firing is not Five cents per cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum per piece. Small tiles all land on the minimum, so count them before you plan a wall.
- Label your drying boards A stack of anonymous boards on a shelf looks exactly like studio property. Your name on the top one saves everybody a conversation.
Questions
The ones we get asked
Do I actually need drywall?
No. Drywall is popular because it drinks water quickly and it is cheap, but any two flat boards that pull moisture at a similar rate will do the same job. Plywood, a pair of bats, a couple of smooth ware boards. What matters is that both faces of the tile are against something similar, not what that something is made of.
How thick, really?
Three eighths of an inch of wet clay for anything up to about eight inches across, and half an inch above that. If you are torn, go thicker. Nobody has ever pulled a tile out of the kiln and wished it were thinner, and clay is the cheapest part of the evening.
Can I make a matching set for a real wall?
Yes, with three warnings. Use one clay body from one batch, because different bodies shrink different amounts. Plan for grout, which absorbs the small variation between handmade tiles and is the reason tiles have grout in the first place. And make more than you need, because some will not survive, and a replacement made three months later in a different bag will not match.
Work backwards from the fired size using the shrinkage calculator, and price the firings before you start.
Two tiles, same batch. One cracked and one did not. Why?
Almost always position. The tile on the outside of the stack had more air moving over it than the one in the middle, so it dried faster and unevenly. Sometimes it is thickness, if one part of the slab came through the roller thinner. Occasionally it is an air pocket that nobody found. Position is the first thing to check, because it is the easiest to fix.
Can I texture or carve a tile without ruining the flatness?
Yes, and this is where tiles get interesting. Texture the front while the clay is fresh, but compress the back thoroughly first, because once the front carries a pattern you cannot rib it. The back is then doing the work of holding the tile flat on its own.
Carving happens at leather hard, and the rule is never to cut more than a third of the way through, which on a three-eighths tile is about an eighth of an inch. The full method is on the carving and sgraffito page.
Can I stick these on a wall or use them as coasters?
Coasters yes, straight away, and felt or silicone bumper pads on the back stop them scratching a table. For a wall or a floor, installation is a whole separate craft with its own adhesives and its own rules, and it is worth reading up on properly rather than improvising. What we can tell you is that a flat tile with a clean unglazed back is what every installation method wants.
Still stuck?
Ask any instructor. There is usually one on the hand-building side, and a tile problem is the kind of thing that gets solved in ninety seconds by somebody looking at the actual clay. Everything else about the studio is on the FAQs page.
Flat is a process, not a talent
That is the working version
Nothing on this page is difficult. Rib the back. Cut where it will dry. Put a board on top. Wait longer than you want to. The reason tiles have a reputation is that all four of those are easy to skip and none of them tells you off until two days later, by which point the tile has already decided. Do them once in the right order and the mystery goes away permanently.
That is everything you need to get a flat tile out of tonight. There is a longer version behind the toggle at the top with the full clay comparison, the drying stages spelled out, and eight more videos, for whenever you want to know why any of it works.
Which version would you like to print?
Videos come out as a labelled box with the title and channel to search for, since paper does not play them.