INGENUITY AND LUXURY 



of these is called "underglaze" decorating, the second 

 "overglaze." The underglaze decorating is the more 

 permanent, and more generally used, while the over- 

 glaze decorating has the advantage of lending itself 

 to a wider range of color and design. 



The methods of underglaze decorating are as widely 

 diversified as those of the art of picture-making. They 

 range from the crude outlines drawn with a stick, such 

 as those of the Arizona cliff-dweller's pottery, to works 

 of art requiring fine brush-work, copper plates, and 

 printing-presses. Indeed, the printing-press and en- 

 graved plates have played almost as great a part in 

 the production of cheap and beautiful pottery as they 

 have in the production of cheap books. And as in 

 the case of making books, they enable endless num- 

 bers of the same elaborate designs to be made at very 

 small cost. 



It should not be understood , however, that the 

 printing-press of the potter has reached any such stage 

 of development as that of the book-maker's press, 

 in which a piece of paper is converted into a folded 

 book, and duplicated at the rate of many thousand 

 per hour. Such machines, or machines aiming in 

 that direction, have been attempted with some degree 

 of success, but the most practical machines at present 

 are still in the stage of development corresponding 

 to the earliest type of printing-press, where most of the 

 work depended on manual dexterity. 



The first step in the process of china-printing is that 

 of engraving the design upon a copper plate. This 

 may be done with acids, or by means of steel tools. 



[272] 



