clay: underglaze surface techniques on dark clay

I bought a bag of dark clay from the other studio and still had enough left to make even more tableware. I decided on tumblers. But what kind of surface technique? I knew I didn't want to just overglaze them with the studio glazes of Majolica or even my favorite Copper Red. And so I slathered on underglazes and then decided to scratch abstract designs. I ran my sewing tracing wheel to make the hatched lines and then roughly, very roughly scratched out irregular and imperfect concentric circles--3 of them. I then used wooden picks--because I can't find my stylus tools--to further mark up the surface.

 

I tried to be as random as possible on where to lay the marks and then STOPPED because I then to go overboard with mark making.

I decided to carve flash tattoos on the second mug that I'd seen at an artist's booth at the county fair.  

I like the look of underglaze with some raw clay kind of visible underneath and used up most of the pink underglaze in the studio to cover the mugs. I then colored the hearts with red and white underglaze, but then thought to add little washes of white too on the pink surface.

And maybe I will be unpleasantly surprised when it comes out of the bisque kiln, but right now in its state of leather hard, I like it.

In fact, I like it enough right now to perhaps only put a clear overglaze on the red hearts for some of that contrast of rough to smooth, and color to black when it comes out of the bisque kiln.