GLAZING oN DARK CLaY
When glazing on dark clay, you will often experience that your glazes turn out different than when using lighter clay.
So here’s a tip to keep those vibrant glaze colours.
Add a layer of white underglaze, engobe, or light-coloured slip to your leather-hard pieces.
After the first firing, glaze them as you normally would and the colours will look as though you glazed on a light clay.
You’ve got this.
Make it stand out.
If you want the colour of the clay to shine through the glaze, then give your glazes a chance to react with the dark clay.
To do this, apply the glaze unevenly around the rim.
A good example of this effect in play is on the dark rims of the two pieces captured here (the blue one on the top centre and lighter blue one on right in the image). In contrast, you can see that light clay is used on the piece in the lower left with the light rim.
This dipping glaze (shown on the light blue top plate) goes from light blue to silver-ish. When this stoneware glaze is applied in a thick layer, it turns silver.
Winter blue glaze
This ocean blue stoneware glaze
Is really fun to work with if you like to experiment with layering dipping glazes and gives AMAZING results.
It is a very interesting glaze because it has a ton of effect in it and it is beautiful when layered on top of other glazes.
It often creates phase separation if it is used for the top layer. Phase separation is a pretty cool effect where the glaze forms two different coloured glazes in one and these create patterns and texture in the glaze.
It often looks similar to the well-known floating blue glaze. This glaze ranges in colour from blue to green, even to a little brownish.
here on a light stoneware clay
As you can see on the rim of this piece, the colour of the clay is less dominant if you’re using a light clay body. This is because light clay often shows less than dark clay through the glaze.
