It has been a long time since I first started this blog. In fact, it’s been so long that I forgot my user name and password and had to spend thirty minutes trying to figure them out. So, you may be asking: why so long?
The answer is fairly simple: I’ve been in the pottery studio! When I started this blog, I did not have any finished pieces that I thought would be worth photographing and then posting to the world. Now I have some photos of pieces that I actually like and I’m planning to post them soon. Until then, I would like to throw out a few things that I have learned since my first post: especially concerning GLAZING.
Glazing is not cool. Why? Because I can throw a pretty decent piece of pottery on the wheel and then dip it into a glaze and totally ruin it. Until recently, almost every piece that I glazed came out of the kiln looking like someone grabbed a cow pie and smeared it all over the sides. Fortunately, I think I’ve found out why!
Glazing is a scientific process. It is NOT like painting. It has a lot more to do with what kind of oxides are put into the mix than about what kind of colors are mixed together. In painting, all you have to do to get a green is mix a yellow and a blue. In glazing, mixing what you think to be those same two colors could give you a brown, a different colored blue, or a green depending on what kind of ingredients are in the glazes being mixed. I actually just got a pot back that I had first dipped in a Royoko Cream and then into a Plumb Purple. The result was a pot that was a speckled brown at the bottom, where only Royoko Cream had been, and a light blue on the top where the two colors had mixed. I glazed another pot with a brownish glaze and put a blue glaze on top of it. When I made the second dip (into the blue glaze), I heard a sound like an acid eating through paper. I didn’t think much of this until I saw the finished product. It came out VERY different than I expected. The glazes ran together forming a feathery look with blues, browns, and creams all mixed together. On the inside of the pot, where I had put mostly blue, the glaze came out a blue that I can only describe as a feathery-ocean color. In a darker setting, it looks like a semi-dark blue with slight hints of light blue, but in a lighter setting there are light-blue highlights that catch the light making it look almost like an ocean with feathery froth moving around in it. The overall color reminded me of the blues and reds that appear at sunrise in the Garden of the Gods, CO, when the sun has not quite come over the horizon. I really liked how it turned out, but I have no idea why the glaze came out that way. I have had other pots that have done the same thing but in the wrong way. They turn out looking like the dumpster outside my apartment: all the wrong colors in all the wrong places.
So, two lessons to learn from this: 1) Do not try mixing a lot of different glazes together until you KNOW how they react when they are mixed, and 2) make sure you experiment with glazes on pots that you do not care about before you put them on pots you do care about. Following these two simple rules will save you from turning a great pot into a “wall-smasher”. Maybe I’ll post some pictures of some of my wall-smashers so that you can see what I mean. Until then, stay dirty!
The answer is fairly simple: I’ve been in the pottery studio! When I started this blog, I did not have any finished pieces that I thought would be worth photographing and then posting to the world. Now I have some photos of pieces that I actually like and I’m planning to post them soon. Until then, I would like to throw out a few things that I have learned since my first post: especially concerning GLAZING.
Glazing is not cool. Why? Because I can throw a pretty decent piece of pottery on the wheel and then dip it into a glaze and totally ruin it. Until recently, almost every piece that I glazed came out of the kiln looking like someone grabbed a cow pie and smeared it all over the sides. Fortunately, I think I’ve found out why!
Glazing is a scientific process. It is NOT like painting. It has a lot more to do with what kind of oxides are put into the mix than about what kind of colors are mixed together. In painting, all you have to do to get a green is mix a yellow and a blue. In glazing, mixing what you think to be those same two colors could give you a brown, a different colored blue, or a green depending on what kind of ingredients are in the glazes being mixed. I actually just got a pot back that I had first dipped in a Royoko Cream and then into a Plumb Purple. The result was a pot that was a speckled brown at the bottom, where only Royoko Cream had been, and a light blue on the top where the two colors had mixed. I glazed another pot with a brownish glaze and put a blue glaze on top of it. When I made the second dip (into the blue glaze), I heard a sound like an acid eating through paper. I didn’t think much of this until I saw the finished product. It came out VERY different than I expected. The glazes ran together forming a feathery look with blues, browns, and creams all mixed together. On the inside of the pot, where I had put mostly blue, the glaze came out a blue that I can only describe as a feathery-ocean color. In a darker setting, it looks like a semi-dark blue with slight hints of light blue, but in a lighter setting there are light-blue highlights that catch the light making it look almost like an ocean with feathery froth moving around in it. The overall color reminded me of the blues and reds that appear at sunrise in the Garden of the Gods, CO, when the sun has not quite come over the horizon. I really liked how it turned out, but I have no idea why the glaze came out that way. I have had other pots that have done the same thing but in the wrong way. They turn out looking like the dumpster outside my apartment: all the wrong colors in all the wrong places.
So, two lessons to learn from this: 1) Do not try mixing a lot of different glazes together until you KNOW how they react when they are mixed, and 2) make sure you experiment with glazes on pots that you do not care about before you put them on pots you do care about. Following these two simple rules will save you from turning a great pot into a “wall-smasher”. Maybe I’ll post some pictures of some of my wall-smashers so that you can see what I mean. Until then, stay dirty!
No comments:
Post a Comment