Acoma clay fires grey, so the potter rag-wipes a kaolin slip over the whole body and paints onto that chalky white ground with a yucca brush. The dark line is beeweed boiled to a syrup; it fires brown-black, never neutral. Walls are struck paper-thin and the surface fills with registers — each band ruled to a different figure, none of them repeated.

This system takes the pot's logic literally. Line does the work; density comes from hatching, not from ink mass. Negative slip reads as actively as painted shape, so forms lock together and can be read either way. Nothing is glazed, nothing is shaded, and the brush is allowed to drift.