Creating Patterns On Pottery

[AWPottery]

What type of utensils do you use to sketch out your patterns on your pots when leatherhard? Or when bisqued?  I'm look for something that I can use that doesn't leave any marks or will burn off/wash off and not show.  Suggestions?

[Guest JBaymore]

Paint with red food coloring and a brush.  Burns away.  (99.9 percent of the reds do..... there are some that don't!)

 

best,

 

.......................john

[AWPottery]

I'm assuming you use the red food coloring for sketching when on leatherhard clay.  What about on bisque pots?

[Bob Coyle]

You might try day glow colors on bisque ware. I tried black magic marker and it left a faint black streak. The  transparent colors are all organic dyes and burn off. Some of the opaque ones have titanium dioxide and leave a white mark. Best to test on a tile first .

[ayjay]

I'm assuming you use the red food coloring for sketching when on leatherhard clay.  What about on bisque pots?

I use a straightforward HB pencil to mark out on bisque  (and usually wish i hadn't  - my artistic skills leave a lot to be desired) but the pencil works fine.

[skyvalley]

 

I'm assuming you use the red food coloring for sketching when on leatherhard clay.  What about on bisque pots?

I use a straightforward HB pencil to mark out on bisque  (and usually wish i hadn't  - my artistic skills leave a lot to be desired) but the pencil works fine.

 

Oh Ayjay, that gave me a good laugh. How many times have I decided to go all Picasso on a pot and had regret... more than I'd like to admit!

[PotterGrl]

My pottery teacher (40yrs experience) uses a regular lead pencil on bisque. You could try it on one to test.

[Marcia Selsor]

I use a lead pencil too. On bisque.I use a soft lead up to 9B.Sometimes I use a graphite stick.

Marcia

[Min]

Wouldn't the pencils be graphite not lead? I think they stopped using lead in pencils years ago.

Min

[PeterH]

Min,

 

The black in a pencil is indeed graphite, which explains why it fires out nicely. However it is customary [at least in the UK]

to refer the centre of a pencil as the "lead".

 

Regards, Peter

 

For those interested in the history:

 

Some time before 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), an enormous deposit of graphite was discovered on

the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. The locals found

that it was very useful for marking sheep. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could

easily be sawn into sticks. This remains the only large scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form. Chemistry

was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called plumbago (Latin for

"lead ore"). The black core of pencils is still referred to as lead, even though it never contained the element lead. The

words for pencil in German (Bleistift), Irish (Peann Luaidhe), Arabic (قلم رصاص qalam raá¹£Äá¹£), and other languages

literally mean lead pen.

 

... Most pencil cores are made of graphite mixed with a clay binder ...

 

You're again right that the metal lead was used in some earlier writing instruments, as mentioned in these two web snippets.

 

Pencil makers use graphite in their pencils for both historic and practical reasons. In Roman times, writing implements

were made from materials that included the element lead. By the sixteenth century, lead was no longer used, but had

been replaced by charcoal, paint, and other materials. In 1564, a graphite mineral deposit was found in England, and

the English quickly realized that it was a useful writing material. Graphite is a form of the element carbon but sixteenth-

century Europeans mistakenly called this deposit "lead," and they used it for making pencils. Modern people continue

using graphite pencils, although today pencil makers mix clay with the graphite to change the hardness of the pencil's

"lead".

 

The 'lead' in a pencil has not been made of lead for centuries. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all used small lead discs

to rule lines on sheets of papyrus before writing on them with a brush and ink. By the 14th century, European artists were using rods

of lead, zinc or silver to make pale grey drawings called silverpoint. In the 16th century, Conrad Gesner of Zurich, in Switzerland, in his

Treatise on fossils, described a writing rod held in a wooden case.

 

... and I have a very faint memory of reading of some specialised use of real-lead pencils in mechanical engineering up to about WW2.

Maybe for marking other metal parts, or something like that.