During my practice of architecture, I had the opportunity to work with the  specification of decorative ceramic tiles for projects. At that time, the Royal Makuum Delft tiles and the Portuguese and French handpainted ones were retailing at a significant premium.  Being from East Liverpool, Ohio, a pottery center, I became intrigued by the relationship between the pricing and the production and decoration of these tiles.  As an architect, I was inclined to draw with pen and ink rather than attempt painting techniques, thus leading to my exploration of the decalcomania process. At first, agreeing with popular opinion, that Decals were inherently inferior to hand painting, I began to examine the reasons for this judgement.  I concluded that much of the bias was based on the very nature of the mass-produced images themselves rather than on the actual transfer and firing process.  I began to draw analogies with print making and painting and deemed that the decal should be judged as a decorative TECHNIQUE not as a decorative product.  Rather than attempt to imitate painted images, I believed that reproduction of my original line drawings could create qualitative products