Colour, colour, colour…

I regularly run workshops and up until recently have had a box full of scraps of clay with glazes on I don’t even have anymore and would spend ages rooting through trying to find something similar to show what colour a glaze might be. That is because most often the colour in the tub does not reflect what it looks like on the clay once it has been through the firing process.

So, Karen and I scrapped the scraps and made ourselves a new box of glaze samples, each one numbered to take the guesswork out of it.

Below the number is a section with just the glaze, pure and simple.

Below that is a row of stamped letters so you can see whether the glaze will cover the letters or allow them to show though – important information.

Then there is a block that has been textured with a fir cone to see how the glaze reacts to textures and last of all the clay was covered with a strip of black slip to see what the glaze would like like on our black clay.

You can see three photos here – one shows a close-up of some of Karen’s glazes, one shows the whole gamut – you can see that there is a wide variety. Very few are ones I use regularly. Most are for adults and children doing workshops and I may use small parts of the them to add a bit of colour to a pot with details such as trees or flowers.You can see from the third photo the smaller selection that are my favourite glazes to use – it’s taken some years to reach that point of knowing exactly what i want.

And now we have black clay, I need to start thinking all over again!