I’m getting ready to start a new custom tile mural. This one is going to Florida and depicts manta rays. It will go over a countertop in a kitchen. These are 6” tiles, so the mural will be 6’ 6” wide and 3’ 6” high. This is the drawing for it. Some of the images were supplied by the clients and some were from my extensive collection of books and clippings.

Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. In 40 years or so of making custom tile murals, I have found very few brands of tile that I couldn’t work on. But some will just not stand up to refiring. They’re almost always, like these samples for a bathroom vanity tile mural, made by hand either by an individual or in a small factory. They were made from wet clay on a slab roller, not dust pressed like commercial tile. This puts different stresses on the fired tile. They’re perfectly fine and durable as is, but they won’t survive the china paint firing. So now we’re looking for a different tile for this job.

These are two sides of a kitchen I did a while back. The one over the sink is a smaller version of a backsplash that’s pictured on the Kitchens page of the web site. The other is a version of the Italian Dinner image from the Shop page. I used it as a sample at the Home Show for a while and then decided to sell it.

Just went and took this picture of a great tub surround featuring water birds for a couple of bird watchers. There are 9 species in this one.