Thursday, February 21, 2013

More Vases

Stoneware with porcelain-like slip to brighten the colors of the glazes I use.



Shino-glazed Porcelain Serving Dish

This is a porcelain body - thrown and altered - with Shino and Temmoku glazes.





Porcelain Tumbler

Love these tumblers.


Shino Detail

Nice bowl.



Shino Tea Bowl

This tea bowl was thrown with a very white, almost translucent porcelain body. The glaze is the same Malcolm Davis shino I discussed in a previous post. You can see that the glaze is clearly influenced by the body beneath it and looks much different than those in that previous post. It is for this reason that I'm developing various slip recipes with which I can influence my glazes without having to alter the glaze itself. After all, I'd rather be able to mix one big bucket of a successful glaze, then alter its characteristics with slips and application methods, as opposed to mixing several containers of the same glaze tweaked out in different ways. That can become costly as well as wasteful (of both limited space and materials).



Shino

I'm constantly trying to push ahead with new glazes, as well as developing new alterations or application methods for older, reliable glaze formulae. Firing the cone 10 reduction kiln every week gives me the opportunity to do some R & D on a regular basis. Right now I'm working a lot with a Malcolm Davis carbon trap shino recipe. Without altering the glaze itself, I've been playing with the clay surface under the glaze, as well as application methods.

These pots are the result of my testing one of the slip (liquid clay) formulas I've been developing for specific characteristics. In this case, my objective is a wood-fired look in a gas-fired kiln. Working with a groggy stoneware claybody for the pots themselves, I'm developing slip recipes I can tweak as coatings under various glazes to influence them. Slips have been used for centuries in just this way. But, not only does the slip have to provide the intended visual or tactile influence on the glaze, it also has to expand and contract with the clay AND the glaze, lest a disparity cause some catastrophic (or even minor) event such as the glaze or slip shivering off the pot. Hence, the tweaking of various individual ingredients that play their own part in the slip forumula.





Saturday, February 16, 2013

Vases

From the most recent kiln firing.




That last one can be seen unglazed in this previous posting.