The sgraffito line is drawn with a borrowed tool and a held breath. A coat of pale slip, still leather-hard, and then the scratch — quick, decisive, irreversible. There is no eraser in clay; there is only the decision to keep going. Tomas Herrera learned the mark as a student, covering a hundred test plates in birds, leaves, and the initials of friends. The discipline stuck. Today his jugs carry a restrained vocabulary: a single horizon line, a cluster of seed pods, the curve of a hillside reduced to three strokes. The tool matters less than the timing. Cut too early and the slip drags; too late and the clay crumbles at the edge. Between the two there is a window of perhaps an hour, and the whole surface must be committed in that hour. When the glaze fires, the cut lines darken against the pale ground — and a mark made in seconds reads, years later, as a form of patience.