Inside My Travel Sketchbook for Fresh Nature-Inspired Ceramic Motifs

There's a battered Moleskine wedged between my glazes and underglazes that follows me on every trip, its pages soft from sea air and the occasional splash of coffee. It started as a habit during long walks along the Olympic Peninsula, where I would stop on driftwood logs and draw the way barnacles clustered in tight rings. Years later it has grown into a kind of visual diary, half botanical study and half travel journal, and it is the first place I turn when I need a new motif for a plate or a sculpture. Pulling it open again this autumn, I realised how much of my recent work traces back to a single splash of indigo in a Lisbon alley or a frond of kelp sketched on a Tathra beach.

The sketchbook also reveals what I have been chasing: not photorealism, but the feeling a place leaves in the body. The grit of coastal sand, the way lichen crawls over basalt, the unexpected magenta of a sunrise over the Coral Sea. Each drawing is a quiet proposal to the clay, asking whether it can hold that colour, that weight, that stillness. I thought it might be useful to walk through some of the recent pages and show how a sketch becomes a finished piece, from a quick contour line on a windy headland to a glazed curve sitting on a shelf in Barcelona.

Pages from the Pacific Northwest and Mediterranean Shores

Most of my earliest motifs came from two coastlines that have shaped my eye in opposite but complementary ways. The Pacific Northwest gave me fog, basalt, and the deep evergreen of old-growth Douglas firs. I would sit on the deck of a friend's cabin near Tofino with a thermos of earl grey, drawing the way foghorn light diffused into the mist. Those sketches are mostly greys and slates, with thin contour lines for cedar branches and kelp stippled in deeper ink. They translate into my stoneware sculptures as subtle tonal shifts, a slightly thinner glaze here, an oxide wash there.

The Mediterranean coast, by contrast, handed me a more chromatic vocabulary. Drawing outside a fisherman's hut near Cadaqués, I filled page after page with terracotta rooftops, whitewashed walls, and the spiky shadows of agave plants. The salt in the air made the paper curl, and I learned to keep the book under a stone to stop it from flying off into the harbour. Those pages tend to be looser, more layered with warm ochres and pale lavender washes, and they have a habit of ending up on my larger decorative plates, sometimes as overlapping geometric patterns that suggest both tiled floors and weathered stone.

A Detour to Australian Shores

Recently I took the sketchbook on a longer trip, partly to visit fellow makers and partly to gather material that I had been missing. Travelling through Queensland and New South Wales, I sat on the wooden boards of a Byron Bay arvo market and sketched the curl of a frangipani stem while a local potter named Jude talked me through her reduction firings. A few days later I was drawing the layered greens of the Daintree from a raised walkway, trying to capture the way a cassowary's shadow seemed to disappear into the undergrowth. The scale was unlike anything I had sketched before, and my usual small watercolour brushes suddenly felt inadequate.

What struck me most was how much Australians seem to value handmade objects in everyday life. In Hobart, a friend took me around the Salamanca Market stalls where independent ceramicists sell alongside farmers, and I watched people chatting with makers the way you might in a small-town gallery back home. In Melbourne's inner north, I dropped by a Saturday morning open studio where the kettle was always on and someone offered me a lamington alongside a critique of my brushwork. The whole atmosphere encouraged me to sketch with more confidence, and a few of those pages have already been folded into the next batch of sculptures I am throwing on the wheel.

From Watercolour to Clay Surface

The translation from a two-dimensional sketch to a three-dimensional object is the part I love most, and it is rarely straightforward. A drawing of a shell, for example, can become a carved relief on a wall plate, a press-moulded impression on a small dish, or a sgraffito pattern traced across a curved vessel. When I start, I usually photograph the sketch, trace it onto tracing paper, and then redraw the key lines directly onto the leather-hard clay with a soft pencil. Sometimes the lines survive the firing. Sometimes the glaze shifts them in ways I could not have predicted, and the piece ends up somewhere I did not expect.

For anyone interested in the technical side of this process, I wrote a longer piece on translating paintings into sculpture that walks through my own approach in more detail. It covers everything from how I prepare the slab to how I think about the direction of brushstrokes when carving into a curved form. Reading it back, I noticed how much of the advice comes from trial and error on pieces that never made it past the bisque kiln.

Working with Iron Oxide Washes

A surprising amount of the character in my recent work comes from iron oxide washes, which I keep returning to because they let the clay itself do some of the talking. A wash mixed with water and brushed onto greenware settles into the low points of a carving, creating a weathered, almost geological feel that resembles the basalt rocks I sketched in Oregon. I often dilute the wash with a few drops of eucalyptus oil to help it flow across the surface, and I tend to apply it in thin, overlapping strokes rather than one heavy coat. The result is a finish that looks like it has spent a long time outdoors.

If you are curious about the technique itself, there is a practical guide to iron oxide washes that covers ratios, layering, and the kind of brushes that hold up best. I read through it again before my last firing and ended up adjusting the proportion of red iron oxide I mix into my usual black, which gave the surface a slightly warmer undertone that suits the Australian botanical sketches. It is one of those techniques that rewards patience, and even a small change in dilution can completely transform the finished piece.

A Seashell Motif for a Small Dish

The most recent piece to come out of the sketchbook is a small ceramic dish I designed for a friend who collects shells on her morning walks along the Mornington Peninsula. She had mentioned that she could never find a dish that held her finds without scratching them, and I sketched a shallow oval form with a softly raised lip and a single scallop pressed into the base. The motif came directly from a page I drew at low tide near Sorrento, where the waves had arranged a row of limpets in a perfect arc.

Designing it took a few attempts, and I have written up the full process for a seashell motif dish in case other makers want to try something similar. The piece ended up with a thin coat of the iron oxide wash I mentioned earlier, fired in a neutral atmosphere to keep the natural warmth of the stoneware visible. It now sits on my friend's hall table, holding a small pile of shells she brought back from her latest walk, which feels like exactly the kind of quiet ending I want for any piece that starts on a sketchbook page.

If the sketchbook pages and finished pieces here have stirred your own curiosity, the easiest way to follow along is to come and throw a bowl or two with me. I run small hands-on clay sessions in Barcelona that pair the wheel with local tapas and a glass or two of Priorat, and they are open to anyone who fancies a slow arvo of making. You can see upcoming dates, available and sold works, and the occasional sketchbook upload on the main site, and the mailing list is the best place to hear about new motifs before they end up in the kiln.