Surface and decoration · Mishima
A drawn line that sits in the clay, not on it.
Carve the line, flood it with colour, then scrape the surface back until only the line is left. That is mishima. It never smudges, it never rubs off, and it comes out of the kiln as crisp as the tool that cut it.
This page walks the technique in the order the clay wants it, with a tick list at every step, three variations for three specific problems, the failures with fixes, and five videos from potters who do not work here.
This is the short version: the timing, the three moves, and a tick list at each one. The variations, the reasoning and the questions are all in the comprehensive version.
Read it, then watch it
Why this is written down and filmed, both.
Mishima has one moment where everything is decided, and it lasts about ten seconds: the scrape. Nobody can tell you in words how a rib should feel when it is taking the top off a filled line and leaving the line alone. You have to see it. But the order of the other steps, and the stage the clay has to be at for each one, is exactly the kind of thing that slides out of your head while you are watching hands move. So the steps are written down here with a tick list under each, and the videos are here for the ten seconds that words cannot carry.
Use both, in this order
Read a step. Watch the piece of video that covers it. Do it with the tick list open on your phone. The page remembers your ticks, so you can carve tonight, fill next week, and pick up where you left off.
The whole idea
Cut a line. Fill it. Scrape the top off.
That is mishima. The line sits in the clay, so it never smudges and never rubs off. Timing is the whole skill: carve at firm leather hard, fill at leather hard, scrape when the fill has gone matte and not a minute before.
The five-minute version
The whole technique in six moves.
If you already carve and you just want the shape of it, this is the shape of it. Everything below is these six moves, slowed down and with the places they fail marked.
Six moves. The tick lists below are these six moves broken into things you can do with a tool in one hand.
Before you cut anything
What you need on the table.
Six things, and four of them are probably in your tool roll already. The one people forget is the metal rib, which is the tool that makes this mishima rather than painting.
A carving tool that matches the drawing (needle, ball stylus or small V tool), a thin metal rib, a bottle of underglaze in a strong colour, a small pointed brush, and a sponge wrung nearly dry. That is all of it.
Step one
Get the timing right, then draw, then carve.
Firm leather hard. That is the stage for carving, and it is the whole reason a mishima line looks the way it does. Press a fingernail into the pot: it should leave a mark. Press a fingertip: it should not. If a fingertip dents it, wait. If a fingernail skates, you have missed it, and the lines will chip instead of cut.
Draw straight onto the clay with a soft pencil. Graphite burns out in the bisque and leaves nothing behind, so draw as much as you like and erase with a fingertip. What you are drawing is a line drawing, not a painting: mishima is at its best with contour, lettering, botanical outlines, maps, anything that lives or dies on the quality of a single line. Shaded fields and big filled shapes are a different technique with a different name.
Then carve. Hold the tool upright, like a pen, not raked back like a knife. An upright tool cuts a line with vertical walls and a flat floor, which is a line that will hold fill. A raked tool cuts a V that gets shallower toward one side and scrapes away to nothing later. Go about a millimetre deep. That sounds like a lot until you watch the scrape step take a third of it back. One steady pass beats three nervous ones; the clay remembers every hesitation as a wobble.
Which tool for which line
A needle tool gives the finest line and the most burr. A ball stylus gives a soft rounded groove with no burr, and it is the friendliest first tool. A small V tool gives the crispest walls and is what lettering wants. A mechanical pencil with the lead retracted is a ball stylus you already own.
About the burr
Every cut throws a little ridge of clay up along both edges. Leave it. Do not brush it, do not blow on it, do not pick at it. The scrape step in step three planes the burr off along with the surface fill, and picking at it now only tears the edge of the line.
Step two
Fill the lines, and fill them proud.
Underglaze, straight from the bottle. That is the fill we recommend, because underglaze has almost no clay in it, which means it has almost nothing to shrink. Brush it into the lines with a small pointed brush, overfill a little so the line stands slightly proud of the surface, and do not worry about the mess on either side. The mess is what step three is for.
The traditional fill is slip: the same clay body as the pot, coloured with a ceramic stain, mixed to the thickness of yogurt. It gives a slightly softer, more matte line than underglaze and it is how the technique was done for eight hundred years. It also fails more often, because slip is clay, and clay shrinks. A wet slip in a leather hard line shrinks back from the walls as it dries, cracks, and falls out in the bisque. If you want the traditional look, mix the slip thick, fill at leather hard while the pot still has moisture to share, and fill twice.
Two thin fills beat one fat one for either material. Fill once, let it lose its shine, fill again. The second coat tops up whatever the first coat sank into, and it is the difference between a line that comes out of the kiln black and a line that comes out of the kiln grey.
Colour, and why pale is a trap
The scrape step removes the top of the fill, and the kiln lightens most underglazes a shade. A pale fill that looked lovely on the bench comes out looking like a rumour. Blacks, deep blues, dark browns and strong reds survive. If you want a pale line, you want a dark pot, which for us means an engobe underneath.
Step three
Wait for matte, then scrape the surface back.
This is the whole technique. When the fill has lost its shine and gone flat and dull, take a metal rib, hold it at a low angle, and plane the surface in light single passes. The surface fill comes off in curls. The fill in the line stays, because the rib cannot reach it. Stop the instant the surface reads clean.
Two things decide whether this goes well. The first is patience: a fill that is still shiny is still wet, and a rib on wet fill smears it into a grey halo around every line. Wait. Ten minutes on a warm evening, thirty on a cold one. The second is pressure: a rib is a plane, not a scraper, and you want to take off the thinnest possible shaving with each pass. Heavy pressure takes the surface and the floor of the line with it, and the drawing disappears in front of you.
Scrape at leather hard and you get curls. Scrape at bone dry and you get dust, and clay dust is silica. If your pot has dried past leather hard before you got back to it, either dampen the surface lightly and wait ten minutes for it to soften, or wear a respirator and work over a damp surface, or switch to the damp-sponge wipe: a wrung-out sponge in one direction, rinsed often, which lifts most of the surface fill without making dust. It smears more than a rib does, and on a smooth pot that is acceptable; on a textured one it is not.
After the scrape
A soft rubber rib or a fingertip over the surface smooths the plane marks and compresses the clay back down. If a faint tint remains on the surface, a barely damp sponge in one pass takes most of it, and a clear glaze hides the rest. A faint ghost around a line reads as intentional far more often than it reads as a mistake.
Then dry it like a joint
Every filled line is a tiny join between two materials with slightly different shrinkage. Cover the pot loosely for the first day so the fill and the wall dry at the same pace. Then bisque as normal. Our bisque is cone 05 and it is free.
Step four
Three other ways in, and when each one earns it.
The carve, fill, scrape method above is the one to learn first because it teaches you what the line is doing. Once you have it, three variations solve three specific problems.
The wax resist method
Paint wax resist over the whole surface at leather hard and let it dry fully. Carve through the wax into the clay. Flood the lines with underglaze, then sponge the surface clean straight away, while the fill is wet. The wax sheds the pigment, so there is nothing to scrape and no halo. Best for busy designs and for textured pots a rib cannot plane. The cost is drying time and a line that is a hair softer at the edge than a scraped one.
Inlay after the bisque
Carve at leather hard, let the pot dry, bisque it. On glaze day, paint underglaze into the lines and wipe the surface back with a damp sponge. Bisque does not smear, so the sponge works where it would fail on greenware. Best for anyone whose carving night and glazing night are different nights, which in our studio is nearly everyone. Only works on a smooth surface.
Stamped mishima
Press a stamp or a roulette into the surface instead of carving, flood the whole area with a contrasting slip or underglaze, then scrape back so only the impressions hold colour. This is the oldest form of the technique and the one that gives the all-over patterned look. Pairs with our stamps and maker’s mark lesson.
Watch it done
Now watch five people do this five ways.
Watch this one, then go carve.
None of these potters work here or know we exist. Between them they cover the classic scrape method, the wax method, the manufacturer version and the mistakes, and watching all five is how you find out which approach is yours. Nothing but the still frame loads until you press play.
Six minutes, the whole technique on a real pot, the scrape shown properly. The other four videos are in the comprehensive version.
When it goes wrong
Six ways it goes wrong, and what to do about each.
The three failures that happen on the first night.
Pick the one that looks like your pot. Every one of these has happened on our tables, most of them this week.
The lines vanished when you scraped
Two causes, and they look identical. The line was too shallow to survive the scrape, or the scrape went on too long and took the floor of the line with it. A mishima line is only as deep as the clay you removed, and a metal rib takes clay off fast.
Carve deeper than feels polite, close to a millimetre, with the tool held upright so the line has vertical walls. Then scrape in single light passes and stop the moment the surface reads clean.
If the pot is still leather hard, carve the lines again over the ghost of the old ones, fill again, and scrape back more gently. If it has dried past that, paint the design on top with underglaze instead and let it be a painted pot.
The fill cracked and fell out of the line
The fill shrank more than the pot around it. That happens when slip goes in too wet, when the fill is a different clay body, or when it went into a line that was already too dry to grip it.
Fill at leather hard, not bone dry. Use underglaze straight from the bottle, or a slip made from the same clay you are carving, mixed to yogurt and not to milk. Two thin fills beat one fat one.
Scrape the loose fill out, dampen the line with a barely wet brush, and refill in two thin coats. If the pot has gone bone dry, use underglaze rather than slip, because underglaze has almost no clay in it to shrink.
A smeared halo around every line
The fill was still wet when you wiped, so it moved sideways instead of coming off. This is the single most common mishima failure, and it comes from impatience rather than technique.
Wait until the fill has lost its shine and gone matte, then scrape with a metal rib rather than wiping with a sponge. A sponge spreads pigment. A rib removes it.
Let it dry to matte and scrape the haze off with a rib in light passes. If a tint remains, a barely damp sponge in one direction will lift most of it. Whatever is left will mostly burn out or hide under a clear glaze, and a faint ghost often reads as intentional.
The edges of every line are fuzzy
You carved too soft. Clay that is still plastic tears at the edge of a cut instead of parting cleanly, and the torn edge is what the fill sits in.
Wait for firm leather hard, the stage where a fingernail marks the surface but a fingertip does not. Then the tool parts the clay and leaves a wall, not a tear.
If the pot is still leather hard, run the carving tool through each line once more to true the walls, then fill. The scrape step will remove most of the raggedness because it planes the surface flat.
The lines are twice the width you drew
Either the tool was too big for the drawing, or the fill was scraped while the pot was still soft enough to smear, or the wax method was used with an underglaze thin enough to creep under the wax at the edges.
Match the tool to the drawing: a needle for hair lines, a small V tool for lettering, a loop only for fields. For the wax method, thicker underglaze, and let the wax cure fully before flooding.
You cannot make a fat line thinner. Either embrace it as a bold design, or carve the next pot with a finer tool. A glaze with a little movement will soften the line and make width matter less.
The colour went pale in the firing
Underglaze in a line has less body than underglaze on a flat surface, because the scrape removes the top of it. One thin fill can come out of the kiln looking like a suggestion.
Fill twice. Let the first coat go matte, fill again a little proud, then scrape back. And choose a strong colour: blacks, deep blues and dark browns survive the scrape; pastels get lost.
Once it is fired there is no going back into the line. If the pot is still at bisque, you can paint underglaze into the lines a second time and wipe the surface with a damp sponge, which works surprisingly well on a smooth pot.
How it works here
At The Clay Hole, the underglaze wall does the heavy lifting.
This page is written for potters everywhere. A few things are specific to our building, so you know before you start.
Four things to know here
Underglaze is the fill we teach, and the 150+ bottles on the wall are behind the free brush-on glaze and underglaze certification. All eight of our clays are light, so dark lines on pale clay is the natural look. Clear glaze on top: Clear as Mud dipping bucket for Purple and Black Level Members, three brushed coats for everyone else. Bisque cone 05 is free; glaze firing is cone 5½ at five cents a cubic inch.
Underglaze first, slip second
We teach underglaze as the fill, not slip. We have 150+ underglazes on the wall, they cannot shrink out of a line, and they behave the same at leather hard and at bisque. If you want the traditional stained-slip look, mix it yourself from your own clay body. We do not mix or sell coloured slips.
The certification comes first
Every glaze and underglaze in the building is behind the free brush-on glaze and underglaze certification. It takes about half an hour, once, and it is the reason our glaze wall still looks like a glaze wall. Get certified here.
Dark lines on light clay
All eight of our clay bodies are light or medium. That is the ideal ground for mishima, because a dark line on a pale pot is the classic look. White on black needs a dark engobe under it, which you buy yourself and bring in, Mayco only. Our engobes lesson has the details.
The clear on top
Purple and Black Level Members can dip in the Clear as Mud bucket. Everyone brushes three coats of a clear from the wall. Bisque is cone 05 and free; the glaze firing is cone 5½ at five cents a cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum. A mishima line has zero thickness, so a running glaze will not blur it the way it would a painted one.
Scrape wet, not dry
Clay dust is silica and it does not leave your lungs. Scraping at leather hard makes curls and is safe. Scraping bone dry greenware makes dust that everyone at the table breathes. Use a damp sponge, or a fitted respirator, and never at a shared table.
Scrape wet, not dry
Clay dust is silica, and silica in your lungs does not leave. Scraping at leather hard makes curls and is safe. Scraping or sanding bone dry greenware makes fine dust, and a shared studio is the worst place to make it, because everyone breathes what you make. If you must clean up a bone dry pot, do it with a damp sponge, or wear a fitted respirator, and never at a shared table. Many potters do this in an N95 and feel fine about it; a proper respirator with P100 cartridges is better, and the sponge is better than both.
Questions people actually ask
The ones that come up every week.
Is mishima the same thing as sgraffito?
No, and they are opposites. Sgraffito puts a coat of colour on the clay and scratches it off to show the clay body underneath, so the line is the clay. Mishima carves a line into bare clay and puts colour into the line, so the line is the colour. Same tools, opposite logic. Our carving and sgraffito lesson covers the other one.
Can I do mishima on bisque ware?
Half of it. The carving has to happen at leather hard, because bisque is too hard to cut. But the inlay can wait: carve the lines, let the pot dry, bisque it, then on glaze day paint underglaze into the lines and wipe the surface back with a damp sponge. It works well on a smooth surface and it fits how our studio runs, where greenware night and glaze night are often different nights.
What do I fill the lines with?
Underglaze straight from the bottle is the easy answer and the one we recommend here. It has almost no clay in it, so it cannot shrink out of the line. Traditional mishima uses slip made from the same clay body you are carving, coloured with a stain, and that works too, as long as it goes in thick and at leather hard.
Do I need a clear glaze over it?
For anything you eat or drink from, yes. Underglaze is a colour, not a glaze, and an unglazed underglaze surface is porous and rough. A clear glaze seals it and brings the colour up. Purple and Black Level Members can use the Clear as Mud dipping bucket; everyone else brushes a clear from the wall, three coats.
Which of our clays works best?
Any of them, because all eight of our clay bodies are light or medium, which is the perfect ground for a dark inlay. A pale smooth body shows fine lines best. A speckled body will show its speckles through a clear glaze, which either fights the design or makes it, depending on the design.
How do I get white lines on a dark pot?
We do not carry a dark clay body, so the route is an engobe. Coat the leather hard pot in a black or dark brown engobe, let it firm up, carve through the engobe and into the clay, then inlay white underglaze into the line. Our engobes lesson explains what to buy and when to apply it.
Why does everyone say to use wax?
Because wax turns the scrape step into a wipe. Paint wax resist over the surface, carve through it, flood the lines, and sponge the top clean while the fill is still wet. The wax keeps the pigment off the surface so there is nothing to scrape and no halo. The trade is that wax has to dry before you carve, and a sponge cannot get into a line as cleanly as a rib can plane over it.
Related lessons
Six lessons that sit next to this one.
Three to read next.
Mishima is one corner of a bigger room. These are the doors out of it.
That is the whole technique
Cut, fill, wait, scrape.
Your first mishima pot will probably have one line that vanished and one halo you wish you had waited on. That is normal, and the second pot will not. The technique is small and the timing is everything, which is why the tick lists are up there and why this page will remember them for you.
If you want the variations, the reasoning, and the answers to the questions everybody asks, switch to the comprehensive version at the top. Otherwise, go carve.
Written for potters everywhere. Where our studio does things differently, the page says so.
Which version would you like to print?
Both print clean, with the videos turned into labelled boxes you can search for later.