Callie Beller Diesel
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Posts posted by Callie Beller Diesel
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Some of it will also depend on the recipe of the glaze. The various flux materials can have different effects on some colouring oxides. For instance, if you put a copper wash over a white clay body, a clear glaze with a lot of sodium will give a more blue turquoise. But if the main flux is boron, we’d expect it to tend more towards green. Manganese might have a more purplish tint to the brown if there’s a lot of calcium. Things like that.
I wouldn’t expect a wash that’s over a glaze to react with a wash applied under the glaze, unless the glaze is especially thin or unless the glaze firing is especially long.
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If you look on the MSDS sheet for the toner you’re using, it should mention an approximate level of iron oxide. I’m a bit rusty, but I think that the levels could range between 15 and 35%. The higher the concentration, the better the image will hold up.
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If I was going to try to get a similar effect and I was using moulds, there’s a couple of ways to go about it.
You could start with thin layers of the light coloured slips to line the mould, possibly brushed or airbrushed on unevenly, or even just very thin pours (2-3 minutes each). Next, there’d be a layer of black slip, and then do the full cast with the unpigmented casting slip. Once the piece is removed from the mould, it looks like some kind of abrasion happens, whether through using a trimming tool or a metal rib to scrape off some layers, or sanding as others have mentioned. I’d be more inclined to do that work when the piece is firm leather hard to reduce dust creation than to sand, but I hate wearing a respirator more than strictly necessary.
Because it looks like she’s slipcasting a textured cup and then layering other colours on top, it looks like she’s putting a black slip or underglaze layer over the whole piece, and using 2 other layered complimentary colours (yellow and orange, blue and green, pink and red) over the black. After that, again some form of uneven abrasion.
There’s a few artists that layer coloured slips in the mould and do different things to reveal the layers.
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If it’s thinner than 2mm then the principles above are even more applicable. Annealing, torching and annealing is sounding like the ticket. I’ll also ask a glassblowing friend to see if she’d be willing to advise.
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Hi and welcome to the forum!
I can’t give you definitive answers to your questions, but I can give you some generalities to help you make your decision. There’s not really a guarantee though, and the Tl;dr is try it and find out. The worst case scenario is that you learn something that’ll make the next piece go easier.
What you’re describing isn’t unheard of. Ideally a glaze used under a decal doesn’t change, but sometimes it does. Sometimes that change brings out good things, sometimes not. Looking at Mayco’s website photos of the glazes you mention, my guess is that the 2 are remelting a little and homogenizing at cone 03, but not melting enough to start doing all the fun things that make them look pretty. The hotter those glazes get, the more interesting the test tiles look. So it’s logical to assume that if you refire to cone 6, it could bring the colours back. (The usual warnings about running and possible cracking apply.) It might also just make more mud. It’s a 50/50 shot IMO.
What will happen with the decal depends on the printer you used. If your printing your decals with a toner printer, the decal will likely change in appearance as you go up in temperature. How much will depend on the iron concentration, but generally they’ll get more sepia toned. If the toner is one with a lower iron concentration, eventually get lighter as they sink into the glaze.. On a white glaze that doesn’t really flow much, I wouldn’t expect it to burn out entirely. If your glaze is more fluid, the decal might be more inclined to fade, or details and lines may blur.
However if you printed the decals with a printer that is specifically for ceramic decals, I’d expect the decal to at least partially, if not fully burn out.
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You can make single use plaster moulds out of a combination of silica and pottery plaster (50/50 if I remember correctly, but if you want to go that route, ask me to look up the specifics). It doesn’t shrink appreciably. After one firing, the material will crumble and wash away from the glass. You can get some materials that will fire more than once, but they’re stupid expensive.
But. If you’re using 2mm picture glass, that’s going to take some very fine tuning on getting the kiln cycle correct due to the thinness. Heatwork is going to play havoc with that small of a thermal mass. I think your idea about torching it and annealing it is a much better one. if you can easily get your lampwork setup going, you could probably use the wood turning itself as a hump mould. Many glassablowing tools are charred wood.
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Weight, except for kiln wash and wadding. And I can count on one hand with fingers left over how often I’ve made that in the last 10 years.
If you’re experimenting, doing things by volume can be a quick and dirty way of getting results. But if you want to be able to repeat those results, you now have A New Project (tm) in order to figure out the specifics.
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If your piece is sculptural or decorative, there’s no problem with using your non-yellowing varnish.
While I’ve seen some instances of copper washes or copper based raku glazes re-oxidize and change colour over time, they don’t fade. I’ve not seen it happen with iron based pigments however.
Worth noting that raku artists who know about this phenomena will varnish their pieces to prevent it.
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If you’re going to mix clay bodies in the reclaim, it’s best to make sure it’s a completely homogeneous mix if you want minimal fuss. Slurry mixing the reclaim or running it through a pugmill until the streaks are gone are both ways of doing that. As long as it’s a homogeneous mix, it’ll be a brand new clay body with properties of all the components. If they all fire at roughly the same temperature, you probably won’t have to mess with the firing cycle, but you’d have to keep an eye on the level of black clay in the mix if it bloats above 5.5. If you don’t want to do a bunch of testing, you could make planters, stepping stones, sculptures and other things that porosity probably doesn’t matter for.
If you want to have a marbleized look, it may well be possible to combine some or all of your clay bodies, but you’d have to make a few samples and stress test them to be sure. If you let us know what brand, we can help look up specs or see if someone here has tried with those specific ones.
Whether diluting the black clay in red fixes blistering/pinholing problems related to off-gassing will probably depend on the proportion of red to black clay. Do you happen to have an estimate of what proportion of each clay went into your test?
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Fun fact, because I just had to do this myself: you can move your custom domain email to google if you move away from whoever you bought it from in the first place.
Because I bought my custom email from weebly back in the day (it was cheap at the time), they were technically just selling a google email spot. On my part, I just transferred the billing. Why did I do this? The old weebly billing account was having issues, and their payment portal wasn’t working, and after spending almost 6 hours on a customer support call and still couldn’t get it to work, i said some bad words and just moved the billing. Got a free month out of it.
When I went to look up whether or not you could do something similar with Hostinger, there were detailed instructions on how to transfer MX records from Hostinger, and everyone else selling domain emails. It’s a few steps to be sure, and like moving your domain to another website builder it can take up to 72 hours. But it’s possible. I didn’t investigate whether you could transfer an email account from someone like Hostinger to GoDaddy to get deals like you do for just the domain name.
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MICR printers are most often used for printing payroll or business cheques, although they might have other security based applications. I’m not super sure how common paper cheques are in Australia at this point. I think the best advice is to still check the MSDS sheet for the toner. The lower iron concentrations from regular toner will still show as some shade of sepia.
The toner printers may well have lost appeal for home use. The cartridges tend to be $$$, can’t be refilled easily or recycled, and the toner itself is not the greatest for organic life. Most of the ones for sale in my area are ink based.
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Thank you. You’re correct. It just clumps up.
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I think for artists, there’s nothing terribly wrong with a professionally sounding gmail address. I pay for the email, but that’s because I got a package deal initially, and now there’s too many things tied to it to get rid of it.
As far as email lists go, IF you were to do it, it’s better to do those through an email service anyways. Most of us here I think don’t need much more than features offered under most free versions of ones like Mailchimp or Email Octopus, so it’s not a big deal at all to sign up for one.
Not that I think anyone is coming after an artist with a 200 person email list, but it’s worth knowing that If you have EU or Canadian citizens on your email list, you may be subject to their data privacy laws, even if you as the sender don’t live there. If you try and set up through say, google forms, they don’t have the right levels of security at all. Email services have all the things you didn’t know you needed, like the ability to delete client data permanently, obtain double op-ins, and have all the correctly worded statements built in.
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I think it would depend on how much contamination there is. If you’re throwing a few hundred grams of contaminated clay in a 5 gallon bucket of reclaim, it’s probably fine. If you’ve been separating it all out, I’d use it for those jobs where you need a throwaway: cone packs, plaster moulds, maybe glaze cookies.
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@kswan can you forward your old email to the new one, or would the integration be clunky? I’m not as familiar with Hostinger’s back end.
I recently had to do a big cost comparison, and if you buy your hosting through weebly, they charge the most. Note that if you like the templates on weebly better, you can buy your hosting (which is your custom domain name) through Hostinger, or anyone else, and still build your website with weebly.
The host/domain name is like a camping spot, and the website is the trailer/tent whatever that you park there. The trailer can be shifted from place to place. Many providers like to offer an all in one service for convenience, but on a technical level, they are separate.
To extend the metaphor, a website that you build for information and contact only would be the equivalent of a tent or a tent trailer. They don’t do much, but you can park those suckers almost anywhere, usually for cheap. If you want to have an e-commerce website, that would be the equivalent of a fancy RV with bump outs and all the fancy stuff. The fancier vehicles need a large enough camping spot (host) to handle the traffic, and the fancier camping spots will offer power hookups so that you can get the most out of your experience.
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Most glazes I’ve used benefit from slaking overnight before sieving. Given Tony says that Tile 6 “is relatively impermeable to water compared to other kaolins, it is thus the last choice for casting bodies,” I’m curious what the comparison is between the glazes a week later.
Side by side, there seems to be a few more impurities in EPK than Tile 6. While the flux comparisons have some variation that might need watching in a glaze formula, the silica and alumina balances are close enough that part might not matter.
Tile 6 is known for its plasticity in clay bodies, which I can confirm from personal use. The plasticity may have an effect on some high clay glazes where shrinkage could affect application, but that’s theory on my part, and if someone knows better, speak up.
As to why a material might be washed and another isn’t: we have to remember that potters are a secondary market for almost all of the materials we use. EPK I think gets used to make glossy magazine paper. If tile 6 is mined for something else, the washing may not be necessary.
Edited to add:
Links to Digitalfire materials pages for comparison.
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I agree with most of what Rae said, except for one thing. As someone who has both been on Etsy, and takes on a bit of bespoke work, I wouldn’t go there to find your artist. There’s a lot of well meaning people on there who don’t have the skills yet to take on a project like that, but will say they’ll do it because you’re supposed to say yes to every opportunity. It’s also incredibly difficult to do bespoke without the ability to meet in person. You can do it, but it’ll take a LOT longer, and you run the risk of missing important info. Etsy lets you narrow search fields so that you stay within the country, but not fine tune it so you’re getting someone in your area.
I would suggest finding a local clay supplier or studio that teaches pottery classes, and seeing who could work with you there.
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Did this for years in Calgary and was fine. You want plastic bins that are meant for garage/cold storage rather than cheap paint mixing buckets from HD if you’re worried about cracking. But that’s usually only a concern if you’re doing it for years on end. For smaller bits like colourants I use mason jars.
Some materials can be hydroscopic and absorb some water from the atmosphere, but most of them can be dried out on a cookie sheet in your kiln to about 50 C if it’s an issue. It’s usually the less standard stuff like soda ash, or Cornish stone. I think wollastonite does too, but I don’t know if it’s enough to cause a measurable weight difference.
The only thing I’d keep for sure warm and dry is plaster.
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So $150 US is closer to $180 CAD, so i got a little more to work with (evil smile!)
The first thing that jumped to mind was more mason stains, or tracking down some rare earth minerals for colourants. I don’t own a digital scale, and that’s on my list of nice to have things. But like a lot of folks, I already have a bunch of stuff, and most of my go-to tools are really cheap ones.
The things that have been a worthwhile $150 bucks included proper shelving and a glaze screen that fits over a bucket nicely. And a good corded drill capable of mixing grout. The piece I was kind of surprised to use as much as I do was a good banding wheel. I inherited mine, but a new one is in that range, so worth a mention.
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A sweet friend will be in LA the week of August 22-30 this year, and is looking for anything clay related to do. Any suggestions or tips would be appreciated!
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Are the white marks something that’s been deposited or eaten away? Hard to tell from an image.
Why do my pieces break at decal firing?
in Clay and Glaze Chemistry
Posted
Some clay bodies tend to not like being refined multiple times like that, especially if they’ve got a bunch of free silica that hasn’t been taken up by other oxides in the melt. You have to baby these clay bodies through quartz inversion accordingly. So +1 for everything already said about foot rings, kiln packs and firing speeds to get pieces through that zone more evenly.