with a fine crosshatching. The Bernabé family started experimenting with this decorative style around 1840. The decorative style require very fine white clay in order to create a very smooth painting surface. The main design over the crosshatching is usually painted in black and occasionally in green. These include images of plants and animals, especially deer, rabbits, eagles, roosters and swans. The tighter the crosshatching is, the finer the piece. This type of pottery is used to make mugs for hot chocolate, platters, large bowls and some animal and human figures. This ware is painted before firing at 900C for five or six hours, glazed, and then fired again. The resulting ceramic resists temperatures of up to 3000C. The work involved in the decoration makes this one of the more expensive types of Mexican ceramic, and for this reason, it is most commonly seen on large, relatively flat platters. A giant urn in this style can take up to three years to complete. The two most famous masters of this type of pottery were Pedro Chávez and José Bernabé, but their families continue to make it. Betus pottery is characterized by vibrant colors that give the ceramics a whimsical look. This style derives its name from the betus oil the clayware is immersed in before it is fired. The oil, which is made of a resin extracted from pine trees, gives the painted pottery a brilliant sheen. One uncommon ware is called engregado. These objects have a special varnish that make them useful for cooking, the varnish acting like a coating of Teflon that prevents food from slicking when heated. High fire Jalisco's high-fire ware is of the best produced in the country. High fire ceramics, including stoneware, were introduced to Jalisco by Jorge Wilmot and Ken Edwards in 1950s and 1960s, making Tonalá the first and primary production of this type of ceramic in Mexico. This production is considered between industrial and traditional handcrafted ceramic. These are fired at over 1,100 °C, causing the clay to vitrify and form a nonporous surface. The main difference between the Wilmot and Edwards styles is that Wilmot maintained the area's traditional decorative styles, focusing on images of suns, birds, eagles, lions and flowers. He also founded a new school of ceramic production which remains to this day, using a traditional green-gray background with images made of small dots, often of double headed