Hyn Patty

Could be a Dry Lakes glaze - there are several available that have super heavy, thick textures in various colors just like this. Such as this one: Luguna Dry Lake Blue There are also several bead and pebble glazes out there that crackle and crawl and due to the rounded edges I suspect that more than the Dry Lakes - such as this Ritual Glaze Bead and here are some Brain Coral Crawl Glaze Recipes Here's another one though a little different look to it shown on Pinterest Crawling Glaze So maybe that will be helpful to you. I have used this kind of glaze heavily on stoneware before and it's HUGELY FREAKING FUN. But sometimes it's pricy too. You can also try layering it on thickly and doing multiple fires to see how it progresses! I imagine if you texture your ceramic body first and then apply this you can really push it further and that may be what he did. Good luck!

Now lastly for a bit of math. Yes, MATH. But this is real simple stuff so no groaning! If I have six small molds I have clayed up and boxed, I need to know how much plaster to mix up to pour them all start to finish with all of their various parts. Or rubber! Rubber is especially expensive, running about $100 to $250 PER GALLON depending on the kind of rubber I'm using. In this case I'm going with Smooth-On.com's Mold Max 40 (the number is the shore hardness). These are for my masters, including all mold parts and the positives for making plaster production molds from as well. So by the time I'm done there will be no hollow parts. Most people can deduct a little bit based on your rough measurements of hollow cavities you won't be filling. So, how much do I need and how do I figure it out? Now I have set up all my mold boxes and clayed up for my first pours I have a pretty good idea how large each finished mold will turn out to be. So they are roughly the following in inches: 4x4x6, 3x4x4, 3x6x7, 4x6x1, 3x6x2, and 2x2x4. These are to produce one mini horse sculpture with parts to assemble, as well as my flat medallion sculpted above, and another larger medallion I'm molding of another artist's work whom I've purchased ceramic casting rights from. I know I just need enough rubber to fill in approximately this much space per each mold and I can pour plaster for extra outer supports to conserve on the amount of rubber I need. If I multiply the three measurements for each approximated mold I get totals like 96 for the first one, 48 for the second one, 126, 24, 36, and 16 which I then add up to get a total of 346. What does that mean? It means that my total volume I plan to fill with rubber (or plaster) is roughly 346 cubic inches. Then I go pull up a handy converter online doing an internet search with the keywords 'cubic inches to gallons converter' and presto! Up it pops. (I use online converters all the time for mm to inches, oz to grams, whatever). Turns out that 346 cubic inches equals just a hair less than 1.5 gallons in liquid. Yay! This kind of information can tell me about how about much plaster I will end up using for making all six molds, AND also tell me how much rubber because I'm making the rubber masters for plaster mold production. Therefor since my choices are ordering the rubber in pints, gallons, or 5 gallon sizes, I'll order 2 gallons. I'll possibly end up with a bit more than I actually need but that's way better than cutting it too close and not having enough to pour all six. For plaster your voids may be large enough to measure, multiply, then deduct from your total volume. Other tips - while this won't help with pouring your plaster molds, you can cut up old rubber molds and use them to help fill in larger volume areas during your pour. This can also keep your rubber cost down. So if I cut up a few molds into little cubes I can toss that into a 5 gallon bucket until I'm ready to pour my rubber. Ahead of time I can figure out about how much of the recycled rubber I'll be using and then I can downsize my order perhaps to only 1 gallon instead of 2! That could save me anywhere from $100 to $250 per gallon I don't have to order in rubber! Mold Max 40 runs $114 per gallon plus shipping so it's not nearly as costly as some rubbers. I eyeball my left over pottery plaster. I have plenty to mix up a couple of gallons of plaster but with the expectation that I'll have some wastage every time I mix, it may be cutting it close. Besides, I'll be wanting to pour multiple production molds of each project anyway. So to be safe I'll pick up another bag of plaster too. See? Simple, basic math. It can be so helpful!

Small update - here is the finished oil clay with a very simple Lego mold box erected around it. I tend to use Legos (or generic off brand) for tiny things and I made larger mold boxes out of wood or thick acrylic plexi as needed for larger projects. I have sealed this down with oil wax and then added a bead of oil clay all the way around it on the outside. I'm about to add a very thin bead of oil clay around the inner edge of the box as well so I can be REALLY sure there will be no leakage. I will then coat the inside of the mold box and glass backing with oil soap. I can fill it with water to the depth I want to check for leaks, then pour the water off and measure it to see how much plaster or rubber I will need to make my pour. At this point you can see I haven't bothered to lay in a pour hole, sprues for air venting, or even mold keys - but I can! I'd just want a larger mold box to give me plenty of space to do that, which I have not set up here. This pour is set up for a uber simple one sided open mold. It is otherwise about ready to pour plaster or rubber. If I did this in plaster I'd want to make a rubber mold of my plaster mold before I started production so I can pour however additional plaster molds I might want or need in the future. Another option is I can pour rubber now and skip the plaster. I can still use an open backed one sided rubber mold to cast a single flat resin. I pull that out, clean it up and fine tune anything I like, even adding more sculpting in epoxy if needed. I can get away with undercuts and very thin areas if it's going to be rubber molded for resin production. I can also cast a rubber positive master from that rubber mold, from which I can also go on to make plaster production molds. So there are LOTS options on how to proceed! In my case I want to do BOTH so I have to decide which one I'm going to do first, then go from there.

I do my best to keep my kilns in tip-top shape myself but I have been VERY LAX at doing replacements and repairs until this past year. Both of my kilns have performed flawlessly since I got them 20 years years ago (10 years of that very hard use, 10 years of very little or no use while they were in storage when I was ill) since I got them and I've really had no issues and needed to replace NOTHING, not even a relay. Two years ago my first relay failed on my small Olympic and that was my first time dipping my toes into replacing of parts. Since then I have dived into gutting and rewiring my kilns and replacing just about everything in the electronic controllers except for the mother boards themselves. I've also obtained patching and recoating materials. With those efforts and vacuuming them out before every glaze firing, I've managed to keep my big Skutt in like new condition. My Olympic is showing more wear - cracked floor and few chips with some discoloration on the outside. But overall they are still almost good as new, still shiny cases! No clue how to rate myself in terms of my so called expertise but man, I'm not afraid to dive into just about anything. As I'm fond of saying "There's a Youtube vidoe for just about everything..." and it's usually true! It doesn't matter if it's repairing a home appliance, your chainsaw, motorcycle, kiln, or your home, the internet is great to walk you through it.

I'm SURE this has been posted on this forum somewhere before but I get asked ALL OF THE TIME to host mold making workshops. So far I haven't, actually. What I do with claybody work on already fired bisques and my custom glazing is already plenty to cover and isn't info you can really find online anywhere. But mold making and slip casting there's tons of into out there if you just go looking! So here is a GREAT VIDEO by my all time favorite ceramics nutcase himself with one of his many helpful videos. If you have never made even a simple plaster mold of your own before, or even if you have made hundreds, I'm always learning more! So give it a whirl! Small Plaster & Silicone Molds by Tiki Technical Tuesday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkf1FR7GsuY&list=PLVz2HhcJdyqgyPYSSeq80qnL-0CNgOJeQ&index=5

I fire daily some weeks, and only a couple of times a week other weeks. But I am often firing my very small Olympic Doll kiln and only have one to three pieces in it at a time. I only once in a while fire my larger Skutt. If I'm working on a larger piece then I may fire it a few times a week for a while until that project is done. Then months may go by without using my larger kiln unless I have a larger load. A lot of my equine sculpture gets fired several times in the underglaze layers, then clear glazed, then may be fired a few more times with overglazes to build up the complex finishes I am known for on my horse pieces. Especially if I did any claybody resculpting to the bisque then a piece might easily be fired 10 or 12 times (and in rare cases more). So that can be a lot of trips in and out of my kilns! Some days I have both kilns firing at the same time so they each have their own dedicated breakers. Even with such a heavy firing schedule I have managed after 20 years to keep both of my kilns in pretty good shape. My Olympic is starting to show wear and tear and needs to be rewired now (still haven't gotten to that yet) but my Skutt still looks shiny and almost brand new. If I had to make an average over the whole year, I fire about twice a week. Some weeks I fire every day, some weeks I take off from firing to work on sculpting, molds or resin casting, etc. But my art studio is my full time job and I am best known for my ceramics, so... Edited to add a couple of photos. This was a larger piece than usual for me, almost 15 inches long. So I had to fire him in my larger Skutt instead of my little Olympic. This was a porcelain bisque I resculpted the mane and tail on, made a new custom base for, and then custom glazed. He was fired, I kid you not, exactly 20 times. What a PITA! Not a project I will take on again for a client anytime soon but he did come out very lovely and my client was well pleased! Took a little extra TLC with packing him too, foam blocked and double boxed of course. I was firing my Skutt a LOT when I was working on his china painting and enamel layers to build his color. This is the Cybis 'Nashua' racehorse sculpture by JK Slick. The brass halter ring was added after firing and due to the sculpture being porcelain, I attached the earthenware base using epoxy rather than trying to attach it in the kiln (and likely recracking later). So anyway, pieces like this are why I fire so often. Many layers can be delicate and need to be set and built up with a number of firings. It took me all year to complete this commission due to various delays & distractions, other deadlines, etc. I think it would be cool if you all posted a sample of your work with your reply or a shot of a typical kiln load, something!

Oooh, I thanks for the clarification of what QOTW means! Nice thread I'll look forward to reading as others post. Well... I'll keep this brief because I'm trying to get a sculpture finished up and shipped off today to be 3D scanned and then off to one of my casting services. I am mostly an equine sculptor and do equine sculpture finish work in both ceramics and resin editions. It's my full time job. I own my LLC and am the sole proprietor. In two years I'll hit my studio's 50th anniversary since I started doing this kind of work even though I'm only in my mid 50's - I started very young back in 1976! My family was very encouraging! Anyway, I got a degree in Illustration with double minors in Art History and Jewelry, then a Master's in Painting. I mostly sculpt in oil clay but sometimes I work with epoxy for a hard original, or I work with wax. I have tried to pick up 3D modeling but so far that's just not looking like my thing yet. I'm also a landscape and wildlife painter working in oils, chalk pastels, watercolors, etc and do plein air as well as working from photo references, and I'm an amateur photographer. I grew up with a dark room in one of our bathrooms so that's my father's fault! I shoot all of my own work and I maintain my own website, newsletter, blog, articles, Facebook pages, etc. I am also a class instructor and frequently asked to do seminars, workshops, judge juried and non-juried events all over the country. This year I'm trying to pick up video editing so I can offer online courses - and I publish articles, so someday I'd like to work on a book. I also dabble in jewelry but I don't have a lot of time for it. I DO farm out my big projects but in studio I also do my own waste molds and solid resin casting (I don't have a roto caster for hollow casting resins but I do 3D print in house), make my own plaster molds and rubber masters for slip casting in earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, and I'm now experimenting with making my own English fine bone china slip. 3D printing in particular has been a steep learning curve the past two years but I got the hang of it! I suppose I'm all over the place but because I do my art studio full time, I really like to switch things up and jump from project to project often to combat burnout. I am cutting back hard on some distractions so I can focus down more on my own sculpting and casting, which means less custom glazing. I am however accounted as one of the finest custom glazers of equine ceramics in the world so that's not nothing! I would also like to sculpt more dogs but I just haven't had time to do any in years. I own two electric kilns, both about 20 years old. Oh! And I ALSO do ceramics restoration! I used to do it on the side for others but these days I only offer it to my own clients. If they invest in a piece of my ceramics work I have a life time guarantee for FREE repairs in studio for most things if they pay the shipping. So once in a while I also teach how to do that, or am doing it in between other projects. I do both 'cold' repairs with epoxy and paint, as well as 'kiln repairs' and reglazing. I have two pieces here I'm just finishing up and shipping out this week. Sometimes I don't sleep much, hahaha!

I've been going back to using porcelain (and also playing around with making my own English fine bone china slip - still testing that!) and one of my favorite porcelain slips was Seeley's. They went out of business long ago but I still have a jug left. BUT then I found that New York Dynamic ceramics, where I get some of my china paints (the rest tend to come from Maryland China and Dallas China) sells the original Seeley's porcelain slip as well as the Seeley's china paints, using the same formulas. Happy squee! Anyway, I digress there again but yay for porcelain slip. I need to get back into practice making settles for sculpture that'll slump in firing. Been a few years and all my old notes are gone, so old dog, refreshing old tricks. Share some photos of your chess set when you recast it, will you? Random rambling when I can't sleep.

Wait, what? What does QOTW stand for? I just saw this pop up when you tagged me, Min.

You can get any platinum silicone adhesive at your local hardware store in the wood stove section - gaskets too that you can then trim down to fit your kiln if the thickness is right for what you need. You'll need it to be platinum silicone if it is a location that gets hot at all as platinum based silicone is good up to 600 degrees if I recall correctly. If the area doesn't get much heat and is far enough from the kiln, then an ordinary, cheaper silicone will work just fine. I'd say you'll probably want to replace the gasket, yes - but keep reading. Any uncured silicone will make it very difficult for new silicone to adhere. BUT with that said, if you are inserting the gasket into a position where it will be wedged firmly into place and can't possibly fall out (not a door seal for example where you need to constantly be able to open it) then I'd just try reusing the old gasket first and not worry about it. Any residue of uncured silicone should not be an issue with firing the kiln and heating it up if you used the right kind of silicone for however much heat is generated in that particular location.

Nice that you keep such records. I do find that when I bother to keep notes (I should keep better notes than I do) that the older I get, the less reliable my memory is - especially after the damage having Lyme Disease did to me. So I /really/ need to make myself get better with my record keeping again. Thankfully my kiln controllers keep records for me to some degree - how many firings, what cones I fired to, etc. I lost all of my old hand written records and tests that I so painstakingly kept when I started with my own kilns back in 2003 during my long illness, alas. So I have had to start all over with my records when I got my kilns out of long term storage just about three years ago now. I do love my kiln controllers. Program in what I want, then walk away! Especially for those long, slow, ramped cool downs that my work sometimes requires. I completely agree with Denice - it makes it so much less worrisome and you don't have to fret about forgetting something crucial that could ruin your whole load! Especially in my case where any single piece I'm working on is worth thousands of dollars! We are also active with our local volunteer fire department and do a LOT of Search & Rescue up here in this wilderness. So I often have to leave the studio for unknown number of hours without warning at the drop of a hat. An electronic kiln controller is also nice where I live because the power goes out ALL OF THE BLOODY TIME. If the temp doesn't drop more than 250 degrees F by the time my electricity comes back on, the kiln controller will simply resume the firing schedule without missing a beat. Whew! Long gone are the days I have to restart my firing schedule from scratch every time that happens! I'm working on installing a turbine along our creek so we'll have backup power off grid. A battery backup or generator just isn't good enough with as often as our power goes out in these mountains. I guess that's not a problem for you if you are using gas kilns! It's not an issue for our gas stove at least. It's a rain forest up here and we get huge amounts of rain, lots of storms. Man, I so wish I could teleport around and visit your studio! I would especially love to see ceramics studios in the UK. So nice to get a 'sneak peek' into what you are doing and how much you fire in a year, Mark. Thanks for sharing it with us. Where as if I get more than a couple of pieces done a month I'm on a roll! But I also do a million other things too. Sculpting, mold making, resin editions, oil painting, etc and not just ceramics.

*grins at Old Lady* Yay, Denice! Yes, recast that chess set! Probably just because young boys are hard on things. If you are up to casting them in stoneware or porcelain that will be a lot stronger than earthenware, though I have no idea what clay you used. You could even cast master pieces, clean them really well and send them on to be molded and cast in resin or give it a try yourself. Smooth-on and similar companies have great brush on rubbers you can use, back it with a plaster mother shell to add support, then cast using resins that don't require vacuum degassing. Fun, fun! Thank you also for your kind words about my silly medallion. I have a whole series of them planned but as always, I have about 1,200 projects going on at once... I do the same with the oil clay I use which is Van Aken's plastalina. I toss it into the freezer in between sculpting sessions to harden back up, or heat it in a crock pot when I'm claying up initially but as you say it's relatively soft. There are various harder/firmer oil clays out there you might like to try. Some of them contain sulphur but that's really only a concern if you need to heat them (they can smell) or if you are making silicone rubber molds. You might want to order a block of something like Chavant 'hard' which is sulphur free plasteline that is very firm. So firm that it makes my hands ache when I try to work it but a hair dryer or heat gun can help. My art studio is in my basement (mountain cabin) though so it tends to stay in the 50's in winter and 60's in summer, which makes it very challenging when I need to pour temperature sensitive rubber or resin... Thankfully plaster is so much easier.

I think you got some great advice already. I used Etsy heavily for years when it was new but they made so many changes, promoted free shipping and the like, and the fees got so high that I dropped them. I use my own website on FASO (Fine Art Studio Online) so get you your own website. Something within your budget that has ready to use templates can save you a lot of misery. You can always use places like Etsy, Ebay, or a gazllion other platforms for listing pieces to draw people in but ultimately I think you'll need to use social media as mentioned. Instagram, Facebook, whatever. I have almost two thousand followers on FB alone but I don't actually LIKE FB so I also do as much as I can with my website, an email newsletter, a blog, in addition to my art galleries and live events, workshops I host, etc. It can go on and on but start simple and build a little bit at a time so you don't wear yourself out. It's taken me years to build the following I have so keep client lists and try to invite your existing followers to your new platforms. As they say, build your brand and carry it forward! Good luck with it. It's a lot of hard work whatever way you go about it. And if need be, HIRE somebody to do your website or photography for you. You can always pay them in some of your work just until things are up and running. Otherwise you'll have to learn how to do it all yourself like I have.

I then layer on thicker portions to push it more and more three dimensional. If you haven't really sculpted anything before, keep it simple so you don't get frustrated or over whelmed. You can slowly progress more lifelike and more detailed as your skills progress. This is great for medallions to mount on a wall as basic relief sculpture. Or you mold and cast it in ceramic to add to pottery. I've made custom light switch plates this way, for example. This particular one is going to be a show award for an upcoming event this spring, and another later this summer at the Kentucky Horse Park. I plan to produce it in porcelain bisque as well as glazed. Right now it still needs plenty of work. I want to soften and refine the mane and then do a lot of smoothing before I will go onto pouring a rubber master or molding.

Once built out to a more or less rough shape and even thickness, I cleaned it up a bit to get the general shape over my quick sharpie sketch I actually did right on the glass. A little alcohol allows me to smooth and also lift off any excess marker. Or you might have a pencil sketch under the glass. Just use it as a guideline for the outline of your shape. Keep it SIMPLE to start.

Not sure if I put this in the right place so feel free to move it where ever staff want it to be! It's one of the many things I'm working on in my studio at the moment. As many of you already know, I'm an equine sculptor and I also do custom finish work on other equine artists' sculptures - mostly ceramics. I have developed my very own style and techniques unique to my work. I am creeping up on the 50th anniversary of my art studio coming up in 2026 so it is an exciting time for me. Anyway, I thought if any of you might like to try your hand at working with oil clay, a simple base relief sculpt is a great place to start. You can make one or two piece plaster molds for slip casting it. You don't have to be a great sculptor to get started. Find a good free use photo of a subject you like or take your own shot. Be it a dog, a still life, your grandchild, whatever! Use tracing paper if you have to and make a sketch of it rendered down to basic lines if you don't feel confident enough to sketch it freehand. Tape it behind a piece of glass from a small photo frame or get a piece of glass cut at your hardware store. Tape around all of the edges so there is nothing sharp. Then start laying in oil clay over it. Get you an even thickness to begin with. If you are confident enough to skip the sketch under the glass, use an already glazed ceramic tile. NO detail at this early stage.

Also watch out - if your piece is on a base of some kind that is thick or wider than parts above it that are slimmer, you should stilt the piece to raise the bottom off of the floor of your kiln a little bit. Uneven cooling can result after firing if the base retains a lot more heat due to contact with the thick kiln floor and the rest of the piece cools faster. This can cause cracking or even dunting later well after firing. If you do what Min suggested and slow down your cooling cycle by ramping it that will also help a lot to give the piece time to slowly equalize the heat throughout. Kind of like the long heat cycle given to blown glass pieces so that it can relieve the stresses in the worked material. As I fire a lot of horse pieces with very slim legs that are on thicker bases this can especially be a problem with the glassier porcelain clays or bone chinas. I find it to be less of an issue with more porous clays like earthenware as they are less thermally conductive.

One of the reasons you are having difficulty with mold release is due to your print lines. They add a texture that will cause the plaster to grip your 3D printed surface. So any roughness needs to be filled in, sanded out, or smoothed over. It doesn't mean that you can't have the texture but at least coat it with varnish or something to help smooth it out and fill in micro undercuts. All those little places you have plaster sticking inside of the print lines are forming tiny undercuts. The main problem with 3D printing, IMO, is that there is a TON of cleanup. I 3D print resins of my horse sculptures and no matter how clean my prints, how much I fuss over no print lines, temperature and other issues still cause so many nit picky things that I can literally spend hours cleaning up a single print afterwards before it's usable for mold making. By the way, you can also 3D print originals or mold masters in rubber! This is super nice for pouring plaster molds and works a lot better than using the hard plastic. But again, you need super perfect printing because you won't be able to clean up rough areas in rubber as easily as you can with plastic resin. So as the technology is still evolving and not nearly good enough unless you really, really know what you are doing and that's a steep learning curve. I've been 3D printing two years now and there's still a ton I'm trying to fine tune. So mostly I still use the old fashioned methods of pouring rubber and building mold boxes. Pardon me - I see belatedly that others also pointed this out so I'll just agree with them! (edited to add this comment)