Words for tools, materials and effects

This lesson asks you to use the right words for techniques, materials and tools when you make and present art works, and to understand techniques artists use to get particular effects. The museum offers the vocabulary of three Islamic crafts: illuminating a book, writing with a reed pen, and cutting glazed tile. Your own tools and techniques, and the effects you test, are for your class. ¹

Make a three-column list from the records: parts, tools, materials. Decide where each word belongs, and mark the words you did not know.

Choose one step from a record. Describe what the surface looks like before and after it, and name a technique you use that makes a similar change.

Zellij is the ceramic mosaic used to pave and wainscot floors and walls in Morocco ². The record gives Rexford Newcomb quoting Jean Gallotti on the lanes of Fez: a house going up is betrayed by a gravel of chips of coloured glazed terracotta, the debris of zellij, and the courtyard rings with the steel hammers of the tile-setters trimming their pieces ². The border inscriptions are made from whole glazed tiles, usually black. The inscription is laid out and the surface round the letters is cut through the glaze to the terracotta with chisels or sharp hammers, leaving black letters on a terracotta ground ^{3 4}.

The record's picture of the tilework comes from Rexford Newcomb, who quotes Jean Gallotti on the lanes of Fez ². For the history Newcomb notes that Leo Africanus, writing early in the sixteenth century, mentions a brilliant ceramic industry in the century before ². He adds that Alfred Bel cites the author of the Rawd al-Qirtas, about 1325, on the fourteenth-century care for building with enamelled tiles, marble and carving ³. So the history reaches the record through writers that Newcomb cites.

Newcomb divides Moroccan decorative tilework into ceramic mosaic and painted tiles ^{3 4}. By Gallotti's account, painted tiles never had in Morocco the success they had elsewhere, and mosaic remained in favour ^{4 5}. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: what does a maker gain by choosing cut mosaic over painted tile?

• Zellij: the types of Moroccan tilework, the inscriptions cut through the glaze, and the history at Fez.
• Manuscript illumination: the parts of a book that illuminators decorated, and the colours of the Shiraz and Herat schools.
• Calligrapher (khattat): the reed pen, the soot ink and the dot by which letters are measured.

Read Manuscript illumination, Calligrapher and Zellij. Build a glossary of ten words from them, each with a one-line meaning in your own words.