This week, I put a roof on my big Amaco shrine.

I found a large metal planter that, when flipped upside down, was shaped very much like a mansard roof. The folks at Amaco provided me with quite a few CDs filled with images from their archives. I decided to cover the roof with clay, and then transfer the images onto it, so the roof would be a big collage of company history.

I started by covering the metal planter with white clay. I conditioned the clay really well, then ran it through the pasta machine to create long sheets. The sheets were draped over the planter and trimmed to size. I did this with as few overlaps as possible, to avoid too many seams in my collage area.

I set the clay covered roof aside, and printed images. I grayscaled all of them and heightened the contrast, then printed them on plain paper using my laser printer. The images that had text in them were reversed, so the text would transfer correctly.

I placed the trimmed images onto the clay, toner side down. This is a pretty permanent thing—once the toner touches the unbaked clay, it starts to transfer itself. Don’t shift your images around once you’ve placed them against the clay. I applied a light coat of rubbing alcohol to each image, using a cotton makeup pad as an applicator.

The alcohol evaporated very quickly, and the images were dry and ready for a second application of alcohol in just a few minutes.

Once the alcohol was dry again, I wet each image completely with alcohol, and gently peeled the paper away. If the image didn’t seem to have transfered completely, I let the paper roll back into place, and applied a bit more alcohol to the back, rubbing gently.

Once all the transfers were applied, I put the whole roof into the oven to bake according to the directions on the clay package.

Here are all four sides of the roof, with transfers, a little ink toning, and some rubber stamping. The front section also has a metal frame applied to it:

Want a little color? These two test pieces were colored before baking:

This one was painted with tube watercolors.

This one was colored with alcohol inks. I dripped the inks right onto the clay, and then blended them with a cotton swab.