In the mid-1960s, Shaw, a student of painting and sculpture, moved away from abstraction in his ceramic work while at the University of California, Davis, and toward replication. Through grant funding, he developed decal that allowed him to create amazing tromp l'oeil (literally, "fool the eye") pieces from porcelain, using it as a 3-D blank canvas. His sculptures grew from tabletop objects to walking figures such as Gubbin's Return. It demonstrate the artist's eye for detail as well as the disguising of porcelain as other everyday components, including a wine bottle, a cardboard box, and a spool of string.