In all my excitement of starting this new venture with a bang, I overdid it a bit in buying glazes. Those gorgeous colours just called to me.. you know... as they do. So I had 12... and not wanting to ruin my little pots by trying every possible variation on them I did just as what I have done with other media before: TESTS. I decided to make plenty of test tiles to get some idea of how glaze combinations would work. First, the tiles need mimic the final piece you intend to make as much as possible in clay type, shape and direction. In my case that is a white stoneware clay. As I inted to glaze upright pieces with and without texture, the tile needed to reflect that. They were all numbered to make keeping records a bit easier.
Bisque firing turned them from grey ugly ducklings to beautifully white tiles, ready for glazing!
I made a nice little table with the combinations I wanted to try.
Then I created single glazing sheets with the various combinations for each tile and glazed all the tiles, carefully taking note of the numbers on the tile.
3 layers of the bottom glaze on both sides of the tile. 2 layers of the top glaze on the back.
3 layered layers of the top glaze on the front.
After a full day of glazing.. they looked like this:
The exciting bit is that what you see here as red covered tiles are in fact blue glazes.. what is grey is green, etc. It is terribly confusing and the reason why the little notes are so important, and correctly numbering even more so... as I found out!
After a full glaze firing and being on my best behaviour not to open the kiln too early, these shiny gorgeous colour combinations awaited me. They look awesome and they feel so smooth. I am sooooo happy with them. I keep picking them up and turning them over...
You can see all the individual tiles with their respective combinations on my Facebook page:
Now it's a matter of giving all these little pots I made earlier a glossy coat of blues and greens and see what happens!! And this time, I will keep my notes properly numbered!
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