When Deborah McDysan and her husband David were designing their home in Great Falls, one major component was to be the art studio where she would ply her trade. Now, products of the studio have spread throughout the spacious house, with her pottery, paintings and sculptures inhabiting almost every room. She even made the tiles on the two hearths and the friezes above the Jacuzzi-style tub and in the shower in the master bathroom.

Formerly a graphic designer, McDysan is a professional potter, but she has space and equipment in her studio for everything from glasswork to painting and jewelry making.

“I like to do a lot of different things so I don’t get bored,” she said.

Her potter’s wheel and the slab roller she uses to make platters and tiles sit among worktables and several shelf units that hold dozens of ceramic pots and sculptures. Off to one side is an office area with desk space and bookshelves. And a kitchen sink at the back, complete with counters and cupboards, allows for cleanups. The concrete floor slopes slightly to a central drain. “I just hose it down, and the construction workers have been in here and I didn’t make them take their boots off,” McDysan said.

At the moment, her backyard looks a little like Tysons Corner does these days, with heaps of dirt and gravel as workers re-grade the yard and install a swimming pool. “It’ll be done just in time for winter,” she quipped. Sitting on one of her worktables are glass mosaics of fish and a conch shell that she plans to set into the concrete of the pool.

The studio has high ceilings and abundant light, with two walls dominated by windows. It can be seen from the second floor, as the two-story ceiling, like many in the house, slopes with the roofline.

A large kiln in a little room off one side of the studio is where she fires most of her work, and she has a small kiln for firing jewelry. “I’ve had this kiln about 15 years and it’s never failed me,” she said of the main oven.

It was in that kiln that she fired the tiles for the house’s fireplaces. In the living room, more than 500 tiles cover the hearth in shades of brown, black and white. “I was making them for a few months,” she said. She “fumed” the colors into the clay, burning salt, ferric chloride, copper carbonate and sawdust on the tiles. “It’s unusual. Not that many people do it,” she said of the technique.

Near the fireplace sits an amplifier and other musical equipment, as McDysan and her husband both play rock guitar.

Some of her favorite pieces are reserved for the master bedroom, including one of her favorite pots, a colorful abstraction of a woman with a bird. Over the bed is a brightly colored triptych illustrating a Hungarian folktale about a girl and a golden egg, a cautionary tale about materialism.

She made the tiles around the fireplace between the bedroom and the sitting room by pressing plants such as honeysuckle, ferns and maple leaves into the clay, firing it and then rubbing iron oxide into the plant imprints. She found the plants around the property, as well as along I-395 in Alexandria, where she rented studio space while the house was being built. One tile, though, has a paw print in it.

“That was my other Westie. She contributed too,” McDysan said. She is on her third West Highland white terrier.

To make the friezes in the master bathroom, she smashed tiles and arranged the shards along the edges of the horizontal designs. In the middle, she set river rocks, seashells, fossils, glass and sharks’ teeth. She bought some of the fossils but found most of the items herself.

“Some of these shells I collected when I was a kid,” she said.

Residents will have a chance to see McDysan at work in her home studio during the annual Great Falls Studio Tour Oct. 17 and 18. See/www.deborahmcdysan.com or www.greatfallsstudios.com.