Sgraffito

Sgraffito, Italian for "scratched," is a decorative surface technique in which one or more layers of contrastingly colored material, plaster, ceramic slip, or paint, are applied over a differently colored ground, and a design is then created by scratching or cutting through the upper layer or layers before they fully dry or harden, exposing the different-colored material beneath to form the pattern. Used since antiquity and widely across Renaissance Italian building facades, where scratched plaster designs simulated relief carving, sgraffito is also a long-standing ceramic decorating technique, in which a design is incised through a layer of colored slip on unfired pottery to reveal the clay body or a different slip color underneath.