ATauer

I’ve been in the hospital almost two months and don’t know when I will be able to walk again and go home. I’m trying to do research and get answers so that when I get home I can just jump into a lot of stuff, including a ton of testing, and anything I can reduce having to just make some up as a trial, when if it doesn’t work I would then have to spend time finding someplace that actually sells real bone ash and order it and wait for the longer than normal shipping times to then do trials with that saves me time and effort and reduces by a lot the amount of testing I have to do. I have to do a lot of work when I get back to work doing extensive testing to get my white stoneware recipe developed, which will take up a lot of time, I have to do a huge amount of new glaze testing, and I have to do a large amount of testing of soluble salts, just off the top of my head. There is also the huge amount of testing I have to do with naked raku slips, glazes, and firing temperatures now that I think of it as well- and somewhere in all this I have to make a huge amount of work, as well as completely rebuild a kiln and finish creating the computer controller for it since I can’t afford to buy one. My to do list for the first month allowed to work is incredibly long, with the assumption that I make at least three 6 ft plus tall sculptures in addition to a bunch of smaller work- I have a month to create enough stock for my online store & that is going to be very hard. Any time I have that is not doing that is doing all these other things. That is why I’ve been posting so much, hoping to get answers about naked raku and copper mattes, finding out if I need to find someplace that sells real bone ash and order it now so I’ll be ready, and so on, because definitive answers to any of the questions I have posted would make my post-hospitalization life so much smoother and faster and save mea ton of time, like if I had had my soluble salts questions answered (which Marcia Selsor never replied to the DM that I was told to send to her to ask her where she buys her soluble salts, and that is getting awfully close to a month since I sent the message without a reply) it would save me a great deal of time and even more money, so I’m just trying to make things easier on future me, unfortunately there just haven’t been many answers to the questions I have posed, perhaps they have been too specific for this kind of forum, but I don’t know where else to ask them, I haven’t found a soluble salts facebook group or anything! That is maybe an idea though, there is probably at least one bone china Facebook group and while I hate it when people who know nothing about an art form join a group and then say they are new to it and could you please answer this very basic question, or worse, explain to me everything you know about how to do this art form- obviously I won’t o that, I know lots about slipcasting and enough about firing bone china and so forth I can likely get started without any real help other than the question of the recipe!

Just a last word about talc, that Cimtalc got brought up during our biweekly hangout for my CMW clay class, and Matt Katz said it was basically garbage, and that we would talk more about it later (I know he doesn’t talk about Cimtalc at all during the prerecorded lectures so I’m hoping he will be talking about it during a future hangout). None of the students in the class were using it, and I’ve seen no mention of it at all on Glazy, everyone is using Texas talc/AMTalc for glazes and freaking out about the news that soon that won’t be available either, but no one seems to think of Cimtalc as a possible replacement. Instead people are talking about all the talcs throughout the world that could be shipped here. I have no idea what is going to happen with talcs, I try as much as possible to not use it in glazes at this point, and I refuse to buy anything from Laguna. They are a terrible horrible company (long story). I will have to hope that another source of talc will become available or I will have to change the few glazes I use that have it in there.

Continental Clay had never heard of Halloysite or Super Standard for that matter when I brought up to them if it would be possible to order better quality kaolins other than just Grolleg as a special order! MN Clay Co about 20 minutes in the other direction (I guess a long time ago they were one company but split up, which is interesting because they are both family run so I’d love to learn about what must have been a lot of drama to have a family split apart into two ceramic suppliers in one city, when many people don’t have a supplier anywhere near them!) either had heard of them or just pretended to when I asked and months ago they said they might be able to order one or both of those kaolins with their quarterly chemical shipment from Laguna, and I guess mark up a price for me, but we’ve since had some huge back and forths about how 90% or more of their stonewares and all of their porcelains, even the cone 10 ones, don’t come anywhere near vitrification, which they don’t think is a problem, and they also lied to me telling me the porcelain I panic bought a lot from them because at the time it had been months since anyone had been able to get Grolleg delivered to Minnesota, this porcelain had been out of stock for months, and I was afraid with the Grolleg stuff it might go out of stock again really soon and it was the *only* porcelain in Minnesota that I could potentially handbuild and sculpt with, so they lied and told me it was vitrified at cone 6 (try over 4% absorption!) and that it was translucent, a big requirement for me, but then I learned they put ZERO feldspar in the porcelain which means it literally can’t become translucent. They told me if I wanted several clays I’d bought from them to be vitrified I should buy a bunch of feldspar from them and find out how much I would need to add to get it vitrified at cone 6, and seemed shocked when I told them if I did that, which I shouldn’t have to pay for a bunch of feldspar that should already be in the damn clays, especially the porcelain, that I would also need to use frit to get it actually down to 0.5 % or less at cone 6, because clearly they have no idea how to make clay. So we’ve been arguing about it for months, because they have a no pugged clay return policy, which should be waived when they purposely mislead me about a bunch of things, and tried to tell me it didn’t matter because no one makes functional ware out of porcelain anyway!!! I mean, they own a clay company, they should know vast numbers of functional potters use porcelain and I need mine vitirified and translucent for my sculpting for a variety of reasons. So we are not on good terms and I don’t think they would order Halloysite for me. I have looked long and hard for Halloysite to buy to use as my kaolin in my homemade porcelain recipe (the only way I could have a porcelain that actually does everything I need it to do without paying tons of shipping - and I haven’t found a porcelain I’m happy with for sculpting at any places in the US.) To buy Halloysite it has 1) doubled in price from where it was a year ago because of shipping/supply issues and 2) the shipping costs for a 50 lb bag are 4 times what the expensive bag costs, so I super can’t afford it especially as I would be going through at least one 50 lb bag a month if not more often. It also isn’t really what I’m looking for with the bone china, or if I could get Parian in the US I would also love to use that with my colored clay. The bone china would provide way more translucency and a hard glass like final product that NZ Kaolin clays just don’t have at all to the same degree, if I could get it. It is really basically glass. My ideas for using it with color are very specific and an actual porcelain just would not work - otherwise I would just stick with my porcelain recipe I developed coloring it, which I do, and works great, and I would keep doing things with it, I just couldn’t do what I could do with bone china. I get your comment about the chemical content of things maybe being the same from different sources but having different properties, but what is in bones is very simple and as a veterinarian I would say that there is nothing special about bones that provides anything different as far as I can see other than what is in the synthetic, it is not a complicated material. Which is why I really think it should work just fine but all these old porcelain books say you need the real thing for bone china versus using it in glazes, but they are pretty out of date so I’d really like to find something modern that tells me one way or another. If I could use synthetic and make my own slip, it would be pretty darn cheap with such few ingredients and so little Grolleg. I’m looking for some very specific ways of using colored clay with bone china, that as I said no real porcelain no matter how white would work. 1.5 years and I’m living in France and will have all these things at my disposal and I will also get to use Parian for colored clay too which will be amazing, but I’d hate to have to wait that long to use bone china. There really should be a pretty simple place to find out if synthetic is good enough or not, so I don’t understand why I can’t find something like that. I could make a test batch I guess with the synthetic and see how it turns out. I wouldn’t be throwing it or anything so I shouldn’t have the problems your friend had, it would mostly be casted with a small amount of handbuilding, I make Egyptian paste and sculpt it which is supposed to be even less plastic than bone china so I think I could handle it.

Well, I don’t know, I watched one episode of his and suddenly was going to convert the large Skutt KS-1227-3 I had gotten for free but needed about $600 worth of work and I’m still *@#$@% working on making my own PID computer controller for it, but the next thing I knew, having already gotten all the parts I needed from Skutt and Euclid’s for the new elements I was going to return everything and turn my kiln into a downdraft gas conversion! One freaking episode! I became obsessed and tried to find any information I could, the downside was I wouldn’t be able to use it for glass but my other kiln would be able to do that, and while my huge oval Olympus was annealing glass for 6 weeks or just full of oxidation fired ceramics, I would have a gas kiln I could technically fire in either reduction or oxidation if the Olympus was not available and I needed to fire some clays I have that are oxidation only. I was overjoyed! Days of work fixing it up gone, replaced by a day of putting a downdraft chimney in it which seemed simple enough, he uses a weed burner instead of Venturi burners so that would be cheap, I wouldn’t have to figure out that damn computer part, and best of all I had a chance to actually fire to cone 10 if I wanted since all of my kilns only go to cone 8 or even lower, and I could spend endless hours perfecting copper reds, getting beautiful celadon and Juns, and ….actually those are pretty much the only reduction glazes I’m really into, although I am obsessed with them if that makes up for a lack of interest in all other reduction glazes. Thankfully my mentor reminded me I would have to babysit for 9 hours every firing in my freezing garage in Minnesota, when I could be making work instead. That having never been taught how to fire gas kilns (other than Simon’s other videos!) it would be a steep, very long curve being able to get anywhere near cone 10 and managing to get reduction right at all. She estimated it would take me about a year of firing on my own before I would be able to consistently produce ware looking anything like I intended it to. That I wouldn’t get to use the Skutt also for some glass casting and fusing if it was gas. The thing that finally convinced me there was no way I should do this was misreading Ward Burner’s technical pages where he listed what size propane tanks you would need for different sized kilns, and thought for my size kiln I would need a 250 gallon tank but really I would regret it if I didn’t get a 500 gallon tank which, haha, I was not going to get a permit for in Minneapolis and my family was in no way going to let me put a tank that big in the back yard. In actuality I think you need like two 100 lb tanks which is totally doable in Minneapolis because I’m now doing one to start with for my raku kiln, they come out and exchange my tank with a full one once mine is empty and I don’t have to try and move it or anything. So I’m saying Simon Leach is not all British soothing comfort food, he can also be extremely dangerous and just so plausible and convincing.

I’m considering doing a little work in bone china, an escalation of my strata casting with paperclay porcelain so I could have works that still have layers of color but are much more translucent then the porcelain I use for strata casting right now. I would also be interested in building on Angela Mellor’s work with bone china and paperclay, since paperclay is the only reason I’m in ceramics, and I feel that inspired by her work there is lot more to explore with the two together. But the suppliers near me only have synthetic bone ash, and I’ve always heard for actual bone china you need the real thing. Which I’m rather hoping isn’t true. As a veterinarian of many years and a former vegetarian, while I realize those bones would just have been used in other ways or disposed of, I just can’t help feeling really really uncomfortable with the idea that my artistic medium is half made of dead animal products. I don’t judge anyone who does, see what I just said about the bones otherwise being either wasted or used for something else, but it just makes me personally uncomfortable. I can also imagine all the people in my life who gave me constant crap for becoming a vegetarian at age 11, and then crap when I was forced by my doctor to start eating meat in my 20s, giving me hell for using bones in my work. I haven’t been able to find really any information about why real bones are supposed to be used for bone china, I haven’t found anything scientific that explains it. And it seems to me that the synthetic is literally the exact same substance, just sourced from different things, so the chemistry shouldn’t be any different and it seems to me like synthetic bone ash should work for the clay (well, I rather consider it much like Egyptian paste, more of a glass like material with things in common with clay, which I love because nothing makes me happier than working with material I feel joins my two main mediums of glass and clay). Thanks for any clarification or pointing me in the direction of anything that breaks it down. I’m just going off of books on porcelain, some of which are not very recent, just flatly stating it without providing any actual reason. So something that provides context would be very helpful!

I know to go to Digitalfire when I need information but I am confident (and Matt Katz reiterated today in our clay class group meetup we have every two weeks that talc does absolutely nothing at low temperatures, that it does not act as a flux which is what everyone was saying it would do, and he has the data to prove it and I have seen that data and it is absolutely convincing. Talc does not flux lowfire clays or slips- Digitalfire is behind the times with not having that information available and also claiming that it does flux when there was never any data bothered to be collected on it before to prove that it worked.) As I said talc, outside of glazing, has some weak to moderate ability to protect against thermal shock so is used in some raku bodies and it behaves slightly differently at high fire but there are generally better things to use at c10 than talc for those situations. And here we have extremely, extremely low fire so the talc is not going to help in a slip and as I went over all before is likely to actively be harmful in some ways and others just act as a completely inert dirty filler. Thanks, but I did not need to be shown the page about it on Digitalfire, I am well versed in talc’s chemistry and in fact have newer more accurate information than Digitalfire has this time (nothing against Digitalfire, I love it, I email Tony Hansen back and forth, I go down extreme “Wikipedia” like holes with that website, but it doesn’t have everything and in fact Tony and I started communicating because his entry on pyrophyllite and kyanite were not complete enough and left me with questions still on how to use it, since his page just said that some amount of pyrophyllite could be substituted for silica or feldspar (turns out actually just silica, not ever feldspar) but completely vague on how much and what ratio to substitute it and I filled out the contact form at the bottom asking those questions and he emailed me right away to get more information about my questions and what I would like to see on that page, and then started working on Insight modeling various clay bodies with substitutions to come up with some answers (luckily I had found out in the mean time you can just substitute as much pyrophyllite for the silica as you want, depending on how strongly you want its properties, including completely substituting it for the silica. I subbed half of it for my silica in my porcelain recipe and it has been pretty perfect, if I ever start to feel like I need better fit with glazes amongst other properties I can easily tweak it.) Since then he has been a great source of information if I have questions about stuff that is not easy to find on the internet or in books. But his entry on talc needs updating. And I maintain we should stop fighting about talc for gods sake and just help the OP develop a slip that will work for him. Here at least are the two slips I’ve invented that work down to at least cone 06, both of them. The porcelain slip is whiter, without the need for much or any Zirconium to make it white. https://glazy.org/recipes/195664 https://glazy.org/recipes/234589 . The porcelain slip might actually work better for you as it has a decent amount of frit in it which may help lower it to the level you need. If it were me and I still needed more fluxing to get to that temperature I would try 1-3% whiting. It really doesn’t hurt to try and it did wonderful fluxing for my cone 6 porcelain body, while making the clay whiter and more translucent (which wouldn’t be an issue here).

I am talking about the talc that we have available in the US right now, not Cimtalc, that this past fall all clay manufacturers had to switch what talc they would use and could sell because the mine that we had all been getting very nice white talc from was sold and the company prefers to use all the talc for its own products and not sell any of it. It was a huge, huge thing in ceramics that I think would have been hard to miss, as suppliers all frantically tried to change the recipes for their lowfire whites or stop selling a lowfire white altogether, people freaked out about what it would do to glazes but because of the way talc works in glazes and really doesn’t contribute color to it (it may affect colorants, that is different) it mostly didn’t make much difference, but some glazes have been sensitive to the new talc that we have been using since this past fall. That is what I have been referencing, the new talc we all use I believe is called AMTalc for brand, although I haven’t paid a huge amount of attention to the name of the mine of our new talc I just ask my supplier for talc and since there is only one that is what I get. I am certainly not talking about Cimtalc which I just heard about in this thread and appears to be a brand new product from Laguna that hasn’t even made its way to Glazy talking or using it yet. If talc reduced crazing and helps with glaze fit in lowfire clay bodies I would love to hear what the chemistry of that is. If it is just having a ton of magnesium I would be rather surprised that lowfire bodies, which often when they are wild clay do quite well without talc and still are able to fit glazes, but the idea that 50% of the body needs to be magnesium in order to fit glazes and not craze doesn’t sound right to me. I’m rather at a loss about why you would need talc in a high fire porcelain slip and why you would have even been measuring absorption for a slip (or even how, if you were drying it out to solid dry clay and firing it in order to measure absorption I would want to ask someone like Matt Katz if that really measures the absorption of the slip because they are in two totally different states, one with a lot of water, and I don’t think the absorption would at all be considered accurate or applicable to the slip. I don’t see how you could possiblly measure absorption in a slip nor why you would want to, or how it would be helpful. I’m not trying to tell you to take the talc out of your slip, I just don’t believe that it does anything for it. If your slip is working for you then I usually tell people not to change what they are doing. I am simply trying to help the OP with developing his slip by listing the reasons why it would likely not be helpful and actually harmful for his slip and what I would recommend he use instead of it. When recipes that were written when clays that no longer are available or feldspars or frits or the mines have changed and the product, like talc, is incredibly different than when the recipes where written, they shouldn’t be accepted at face value and I honestly don’t think the slip that was recommended that we are all talking about is a good slip for the OP’s needs. Just because it worked for decades at higher temperatures does not mean it will work now even on the recommended temperature let alone the temp the OP is trying for. I think we should be finding other slips or recommending ingredients for a slip based on today’s reality.

It is buried in another reply but I already seal my alternatively fired and raku ware with Trewax, which is one of the best and most popular floor paste waxes used with raku. I’m quite happy with it.

The most difficult thing is right now being stuck in the hospital unable to walk since June 3rd, I just can’t DO anything to test any thing out. I’m taking Ceramic Materials Workshop clay class right now, in the spring I did the lectures only so I could develop my porcelain recipe and they let me upgrade so starting July 1 I have been in their full class, with labs and discussions etc. And my labs are individually designed by Matt to help me develop my white stoneware, that I hope as one of the things it does it will work as a raku clay but also might even work as the slip for naked raku. But I can’t do my labs because I’m in the hospital and there is no one in my circle of family or friends who might be willing to do the simple labs for me, because they know nothing about clay or kilns. It seems like maybe quite a few of the not too many labs don’t actually require firing, but even those I can’t do. I can save them and try the labs after the course is ended, but then I won’t be able to ask questions and ask for advice and I will be totally on my own in terms of developing this white stoneware. Which is really tricky with trying to get the clays you want in it while keeping it white. I really don’t know what to do. It is incredibly frustrating that the upgrade allowing me to do the labs kicked in 3 days before I hurt myself and ended up endlessly in the hospital. Which really there is no point to having the upgrade now because I can’t do the labs which means I don’t have anything to present or ask or contribute during discussions. It is totally worthless to me, unfortunately.

You don’t happen to have access to some of the recipes for the ones that last years and years, do you? That is definitely not something they tend to disclose when publishing them. And for copper mattes that really makes me wonder, since the recipes are all quite similar, I mean it is usually 80 or 90% copper and the rest flux. With occasional RIO or cobalt added. Sometimes the ratios are a little bit different than that, but not too often. So what is there to add or change to make them last for years? Lithium? Frit?

I seal my pots with Trewax floor wax paste, have for a long time, starting with pitfiring, based on the recommendations from a huge number of raku and pit/alternative firing nerds - one of those Instagram posts where a well known raku artist in his captions mentioned he used it after doing the firing shown in his video, and a ton of other raku/alternative firing mid-late career artists whose work I know jumped in to say that was the best by far and from my own research because it is mostly Carnauba wax which is the hardest natural wax on earth plus it has some petroleum derived microcrystalline wax in it as well which I can’t be a hypocrite about using because I use it all the damn time for the lost wax process for glass casting, I believe the two types of waxes provide the best kind of protection, although no wax that I know of has been discovered to block the effects of UV rays…I believe a harder wax like this will be more likely to protect the rather fragile items in general and I like the type of gloss it gives and that it lasts a very long time, and I hope from it being a harder floor wax that it will protect better against things you would associate floors needing protection from, mainly in my case scratches and marks, fingerprint marks, smears of grease from being handled by dirty hands, dirt and dust…etc. But floor waxes don’t protect against UV degradation unfortunately! The only thing on the market that actually does protect against a lot of things ceramic objects need protection from and won’t turn yellow or amber from UV is aliphatic polyurethane, I have done a ridiculous amount of research about this in order to find anything at all I could use as cold glaze on my large scale sculptures when I’m hiding their seams and trying to match the shine level of the glaze on the rest of the sculpture, as I refused to use what most people used and just accepted that you would go to all that trouble, hours and hours of work, to hide a seam, only to have it turn yellow or amber in a few years and make it obvious, plus in my opinion pretty much ruin the sculpture. It is unfortunately often difficult to find as even Home Depot doesn’t carry any aliphatic polyurethanes, and the gallons are almost $200- which for my work you need gloss, satin, and matte versions to mix them so you get just the right match to your glaze, although I did recently find Lowe’s selling quarts sizes which I didn’t know they made for about $40. I bring this up because if it was cheaper and I wasn’t so happy with Trewax, I might use it on my raku and alternative fired work, FYI it is great for anything you want to leave outside especially year round, most cities have rules that it is the only thing that can be used to protect public murals, other than UV protection it protects against chemical attacks, physical wear and tear, is waterproof and I could go on with its benefits. So for outdoor raku work, and for me also any outdoor sculptures I make, but also would be great for the outside of planters etc. I bring it up & say so much about it because it is making me wonder if it wouldn’t help specifically with copper mattes and the copper lusters that lose their colors largely because of UV light. Maybe this is the best thing to use on those? To jump to the naked raku, I asked because from what I have gathered the Jacobsons (and Asselborough who also uses some commercial clays for his slip, mixed with a few dry ingredients) did years and years of testing lots of slips, and say that Amador is the best they have found. Although yes, in one of the articles they did say they found a number of other good clays as well, but that is rare that anything like that is included with their descriptions of how to do their technique. So it seems like going back to their very first recipe and using it wouldn’t be the best idea. I think maybe I didn’t quite get the reason why I don’t want to use Amador, other than my Laguna hate- I *really don’t want to use a commercial clay and have to slake and sieve it*. As I make my own porcelain paperclay from dry ingredients and a recipe I developed, and I am working on a white stoneware recipe that I hope will also work as a raku clay in addition to me using my porcelain for raku/pit (I don’t know why I even feel like I should have a second clay for it, but partly it is with the idea if I want something with more tooth, or something more like a B clay, I could also just mix my white stoneware and porcelain 50:50 or 60:40 or whatever and get those properties. And I do need for right now something with just a little tooth to use on the wheel). I make up my own slips, terra sigs, my glazes, I even make my own underglazes…while right now there are two stonewares that I purchase pugged and use in small enough quantities that I’m content to buy them pugged (and they are a speckled light brown and a black stoneware, which would be a pain in the ass to develop recipes for especially when I don’t use them enough to merit it). It would be so much easier and better for my back and disabilities and convenience to make a slip for this out of dry materials instead of a pre-made clay. I wish Laguna provided more information on their clays to help guess what is in them. I could probably try my white stoneware once I have the recipe perfected (which it is a long way away from that happening) and again I think there is always the option of adding more alumina to the slip if it isn’t working perfectly- that seems to be what several people did with several of their versions of their one step slip, especially if it was sticking too much. I don’t really want to wait until I have my white stoneware recipe ready to start trying naked raku, but maybe I have to. Or maybe while I’m waiting I just use their original dry materials recipe, it certainly produced a lot of great work for many years even if they did feel like they needed to find something better. It doesn’t solve my issue with really wanting to be able to fire it up to cone06 or at least pretty close to it…I mean that is when the glaze they use matures, it has a pretty wide range actually but 06 or 05 is probably where it is its glossiest and you shouldn’t go beyond that. So I’ve inferred that if you go up that high it is hard to get the slip and glaze off. To change that, I would need to have access to my Naked Raku book (I’m in the hospital for…ever it seems, so I don’t have it at hand) to look at what the person who altered the Rigg’s one step slip so it would fire up to cone 06, and see if I can tell what were the important things that allowed that change…I’m going to guess in order to fire it higher without it becoming too attached to the pot the main thing would probably be once again alumina, to make it more refractory. Then I would have to work on the glaze part, so it too doesn’t mature so much that it is too hard to come off. Most everyone loves and uses their original glaze, but maybe I just need to find a clear crackle glaze that fires up a lot higher, or alter the original to make it more refractory…so, reduce the gerstley borate by probably a good amount, and add in some clay? Still have to make sure it crazes and produces nice crackles at that too. If anyone knows of a good raku clear crackle recipe that matures more around cone 04-c2 (or somewhere in there) but still actually melts enough for naked raku by cone 06, please let me know! Ha! Probably a tall order. I have seen a ton of various clear crackle glazes, many of them very similar to each other, but while they might have slightly different maturation temps, most of them are within a pretty narrow area ultimately of c010 maybe at the lowest and not too much above 06-04 at the other end. It would be a lot easier to simply use a clear glaze for regular oxidation firing but am I going to be able to get nice crackles and could I change it so it produces them without lowering its cone down to where I don’t want it to be? It is frustrating as hell being in the hospital right now because I can’t go through my books to see if I can find anything helpful, and I also can’t DO anything damnit! I can’t just try their original slip and see if I like it just fine and don’t really need to alter it, to just try firing the slip and glaze up to cone 06 or a little below and just see what happens! I mean the glaze we know has a huge range, the slip it is a lot less known, but maybe it already works perfectly fine at cone 06, or only needs very minor modifications to make it work. Although I suppose if that were the truth others would have done it and talked and written about it by now and I certainly haven’t heard anything about it. It seems to me though that it shouldn’t be that difficult to adjust to, as they usually pull around 1700 deg now right? And 1800 or about 1860 is not that much hotte

I hadn’t heard of this new Cim Talc from Laguna. It definitely looks like a huge improvement on the options in the Western Hemisphere. From everything anyone on Glazy has said regarding talc and color by impression was that definitely the Eastern Hemisphere was also having large problems with getting talc that isn’t full of iron and makes things very dark. I respectfully disagree that talc, if using the most commonly available talcs in both hemispheres not including this new talc from Laguna for the moment, would not have an effect on the slip in terms of color. I saw the huge, just incredibly HUGE difference when Continental Clay changed their lowfire white claybody which had been brilliantly white before (and also much much better to work with, when they changed to the new talc it became very short, prone to constant cracks, and was an absolute nightmare to use and build with) and they just put the new Am-Talc in it with no recipe change at all other than that and it went from brilliantly white, honestly whiter sometimes than a lot of their porcelains, to a dark ugly, just terribly ugly buff. It no longer worked with hardly any of the glazes my friends who taught with it had been using. Everyone in her class ended up putting white slip over everything or using a white glaze under any other glazes and even under underglazes, if they had forgotten to put slip on it. There were some significant challenges when texture, which I used a ton of and so did most of my friend’s students (which included my mom, which is why I know so much about this), as you wanted to be able to see the texture but still needed to cover it with white slip, and using white glaze didn’t really work because you couldn’t put that on and then do Mishima which was very popular in that class and a technique I use extensively. I think in the case of a slip, even 5% of the talcs that are currently available worldwide would have a negative influence on the color, it seems like it has an outsized influence on color. As for its fluxing capability, I’m going off the data presented in the CMW clay class where Matt Katz did several studies firing claybodies with different amounts of talc in them compared to a control through a whole firing range appropriate for lowfire clay (I think up to cone 2 or maybe a little bit higher just to have the most amount of information) and found absolutely no change in both absorption and density, this was repeatable across a number of attempts, different claybodies, and different studies and it was plain as day from the data that talc did not act as a flux, it did not ever, even a tiny bit, change the absorption or density measurements. Compared to what you describe seeing in your own clay, that can’t really hold up because it did not have density measured as well, it was not tested through a range of temperatures, and we don’t know if it is repeatable, or if the change you observed had anything at all to do with the talc…when I was talking to the owner/clay maker of Clay Arts Center in Tacoma and brought up my problems with the supplier I had at the time locally having horrifically high absorption rates even for porcelains at cone 10 he said that even with his own company the absorption rate they post is considered what you will find *within up to +/- 2%* because it can vary quite a bit depending on a lot of factors, the kiln, what temp or heatwork it was really fired to, exactly how you did the absorption test…if most people took the time and tested their own clay at the same temp/firing schedule a number of times over a month or something they will likely find variations in their results, that is just a normal property of science, in science we actually find it suspicious if we are getting no variation in our measurements because something with the experiment is probably going wrong then or if we are looking at someone else’s data we worry that it was falsified or that they did something wrong with measuring. A drop of 0.5% in absorption can happen absolutely naturally, or because of numerous factors including the temperature of the water that day, it is really quite a low drop in absorption that when testing my own recipe for porcelain I would have just tossed that data out or considered it a normal variation versus attributing it to what I was testing (amount of feldspar, amount of frit, amount of both, cone temp fired to, amount of whiting, etc). For absorption, unless we are going from 0.5% to 0.0% in a porcelain and it was extremely repeatable, I would need a lot of convincing to believe it was related to the talc. Since you said it was due to the talc, I’m assuming then you were testing a lowfired body, which have as a characteristic quite high absorption rates which means a change of 0.5% if the natural absorption is 7%, 10%, 15%, 20+%, I would need as I said a loooooot of convincing that it was repeatable and that it was due to the talc and not anything else in the testing process, and would likely have considered what would be, if actually due to the talc, such a minuscule change for such a porous body, to be not much different then what Matt Katz’s data shows- that it really does not flux and cause the clay to become closer to vitrification, because going from 11% to 10.5% is not actually going to affect anything and is not enough fluxing to be worth doing, barely enough of a change to really consider it fluxing. It especially is not then providing enough flux to make it useful in anything, so I would stick with my advice that the talc is not going to provide the fluxing that the slip needs and therefore it would be better to use different materials in its place, especially as worldwide, other than this new Laguna talc, no one has access to a talc that makes things white. If it had properties that were helpful enough to merit its use, I might consider the amount it is going to dirty up my slip worth it and use as much Zirconium silicate as I needed to make the slip white, but it really doesn’t have any use so…and while ball clays may have as much or more iron in them compared to the talc, in practical use that doesn’t seem to fire quite the same when you compare clays with a lot of ball clay in them compared to clays that used the new Am-Talc for their lowfire whites and found that their clay had become way darker than what we typically see with a similar amount of the lighter firing ball clays. Also, since ball clays vary so much throughout the world, I have been finding through conversing with people all over the world on Glazy that a lot of places, including I believe the Middle East, have some ball clays that have a lot less iron and titanium in them compared to the ball clays in the US. England even is an example of that, their ball clays for the most part are significantly whiter firing then American ball clays, just like their kaolins. So I would not assume immediately that Iran doesn’t have access to some possibly quite light ball clays, some of the ones I have seen on Glazy have less iron and titanium than a lot of the popular kaolins. Oh, and just to address the last point of your I think I didn’t address, in terms of at 04 talc acting in another capacity than flux, the only reason in claybodies to use talc other than the supposed fluxing which I still maintain does not happen, is it is an ok material to help with thermal shock. It is used in a lot of raku claybodies, I have never seen any data to back up that it works for thermal shock but it used to be popular in the older raku books for recipes for claybodies to have some talc for thermal shock (although a lot were also using it back then to try and make the claybody white while using a lot of fireclays and stoneware clays, which obviously doesn’t help with that anymore) or possibly just as a pretty inert filler for some clays, that wasn’t really supposed to do anything. I would say that the thermal shock reason probably doesn’t apply to slip, while the filler reason could but I think that this recipe really does need that talc replaced with one or more of the suggestions I gave in my last post, as I do not think the talc is a good ingredient and that it could be actively harmful (if it makes his slip less white, and he has to use more Superpax, which is refractory, then that could make it less effective or not work at all at the temperature he is trying to use it for. So it is not at all a benign choice). It does have the benefit of decades of being used but that doesn’t mean with materials changing that it may need to be significantly updated or no longer used, that happens with ceramic glazes, slips, claybodies etc all the time. It’s part of the lifecycle as it were of ceramics. Just because something worked 30 years ago and was working well for a while after that, doesn’t at all mean it works now. Personally, considering just how much fluxing he needs to have it work at the temp he is using, I would strongly suggest in place of talc he use whiting. Maybe not the entire 5%, testing will determine how much he needs, but he needs so much fluxing 5% is a possibility. And it has the added benefit of making slips whiter and interacting with the kaolin in such a way that it might be beneficial because of that too. I would say I would see how much whiting it needs and any few percents left either just leave it below 100 (and just recalculate to get it to add up to 100%) or put in a few percents of neph sye as that couldn’t hurt and might help, having some R20s in there might not hurt. )

I will soon be firing up my first raku kiln, and I have gotten quite obsessed with the art form and have been consuming every book I can find on it, no matter how old (just finally learned today what the actual real Raku kilns were/are like in Japan in one of the oldest books, all the other books didn’t bother to cover that only ways to make kilns for the Western version that are more contemporary. So I have two questions as I start off, planning on spending a whole day each week doing raku partly because I know it will be good for me to ruin and lot of pots and learn not to get attached to my work and I think it will help me with my perfectionism since I have only a real fraction of control with this method. The first question is, what is the current consensus on copper mattes? Depending on a book’s age, or articles I have found etc. whether or not copper matte’s are doomed to have their colors fade within a fairly short amount of time seems to go back and forth, and frankly I find it a bit confusing to come across so much information about them losing colors in a few years and needed to warn customers about it while seeing so much copper matte for sale these days. While I recognize that perfecting the techniques for getting good copper mattes takes quite some time and is not easy, I’m not attracted to raku only for the simple easy beginner glazes, and I figure it couldn’t hurt anything to start right away working on getting good copper mattes just using small pinch pots so I’m not wasting a lot of nice pots and clay. But I don’t want to pursue the technique and its variations if it is pretty certain that the colors will disappear. I have a few really good glazes I love that are multi-colored and I could probably be quite happy with in place of copper mattes if they are essentially a waste of time. My other question is about naked raku, which I find fascinating and gorgeous, have read the recent Naked Raku book several times now, and am having a hard time picking whose version to go with. I realize I most likely need a two step naked raku system because while I won’t be producing work at all like the Jacobsons, I do really like the idea of using colored slip and colored terra sig that is burnished under the slip and glaze and then being able to scrape designs on my work, whether it is colored or black and white. However, it seems everyone these days has stopped using recipes for the slip for two step naked raku and for a variety of reasons I really do not want to buy Laguna’s clays or any commercial raku clay that I have to slake down and sieve out all the grog, leaving me with more grog over time than I really have use for. I’m wondering if anyone still uses some of the other recipes for the Jacobson’s slip that I have found in some of the older books, or have adapted any of the one step slips to work for use with sacrificial glaze? Especially as in the Naked Raku book they had a recipe that someone had developed for one step slip that worked at around cone 06, much higher temperature than normal, because that artist wanted to be able to use the naked raku slip on the same pots that she also fired some of her glazes, which all matured around cone 06. I also typically fire most of my ware to cone 06 or close to it, and to be able to use glazes on some of my naked raku pots as well as fire naked raku pots with glazed pots would be really nice, I have a pretty big raku kiln and do not want to be firing each naked raku pot alone, and waste fuel and heat. I’ve wondered why the Jacobsons in particular moved away from their slip made of dry ingredients and went with the same commercial clay they use to throw their pots- it seems to be that even if put on bisqueware the same clay would end up being harder to remove, versus something that is designed to more strongly not fit wonderfully but long enough to get the pot fired and reduced. And is the temp they pull their pots at because the slip matures or does their glaze mature too much by then and you don’t want it getting to the point it won’t come on, which seems like then just use a glaze that matures later. I’ve wondered about trying their original slip but sort of mashing it up a little with some of the one step slips, like adding more alumina hydrate to it in order to keep the slip from sticking too much. Obviously I have how I want to do naked raku, which is use dry materials to make the slip and be able to fire it to cone 06 for several reasons, and I’m wondering if anyone has managed to figure out how to do that, or has good suggestions on things to try to perhaps get there, or if I am pretty much stuck pulling the pots much earlier and therefore not being able to use my glazes on the those same pots together, and if there is any alternative to buying Laguna’s Amador, since I have sworn never to buy Laguna clay every in my life again. Thanks!

Since these recipes are a bit out of date, I would not recommend putting talc into a slip, especially if you want the slip to be white! So many recipes like this and for white clay bodies are based on the talc we no longer have access to and any talc you could find these day would make the slip darker. I’ve never understood why anyone wanted to put talk into slips anyway, research has shown that talc does not act as a flux in claybodies as everyone has always believes, it follows that it would not act as a flux in a slip either. And there really isn’t much use for magnesium in your average slip from the talc either. You might have better luck with getting a slip recipe to mature at your very low temperature by adding whiting, which will flux the hell out of it and also act as an agent to make it whiter. I would recommend starting very low, adding only 1-2% of whiting, and seeing how it performs before considering adding any additional. Likely 1 or 2% will be quite enough. You could also consider adding in place of the talc some neph sye. Depending on how white you want it, you might want to significantly change your clay ratios and have more like 50 kaolin and 15 ball clay, especially if your ball clays tend to have a lot of iron and titanium in them. With using fluxes such as frit or borax, whiting, and neph sye, I would not be worried that the kaolin would be noticeably more refractory than the ball clay. I use a porcelain slip with similar amounts of kaolin and ball clay and have no issues with flaking or crawling, and my recipe is supposed to work from cone 06-10, but it is always a good idea to test first with the lowfire clays which are sometimes more finicky about their slips, but I have used my porcelain slip successfully at cone 06. But I’m not posting the recipe for that one now because I don’t believe it would be the best for quite as low as you are going. Good luck!

So in glass fusing we have frits too, they are nothing like ceramic frits but are simply clear and colored various sizes of crushed glass that have been sieve to a specific size, they are extremely commonly used in glass fusing for decoration of various kinds. It is my guess that the mug the original poster is referencing used some of those frits in the glaze, not crushed bottle glass. You can get the frits in several different COES made by a variety of companies and out of different kinds of glass. As someone who was a glass sculptor long before I entered the ceramic world, there are definitely ways you can use glass on the outside of nonfunctional work. For example, Steven Branfman (and myself- although I do it differently) throws the beginning of a vase, takes it off the wheel being careful not to touch the outside with his hands, and rolls the vase in various sizes and colors of glass he has smashed up (I’m pretty sure he just collects a variety of recycled glass but tends to manage to find a good number of brightly colored ones) then puts it back on the wheel and continues throwing, manipulating only from the inside and carefully widening and enlarging the vase from the inside so he doesn’t touch or cut himself on any of the glass. He lets it dry like normal, then applies a clear raku glaze, and raku fires it, and they look gorgeous. The thing is, since I’m doing research on adding glass to claybodies, they can surprisingly when mixed with ceramics and glazes act quite refractory, instead of melting at the low temperature you would assume they would. I have pages and pages of research on this. The raku glaze actually helps act as a flux with the glass and they melt a lot like the pic the OP put up, although from what I’ve seen and my experience usually the glass forms longer bursts of colors that, depending on the size of the glass chunk that started as, can be about 1 cm long sometimes. I’m a handbuilder, so I can’t quite do it the way Branfman does. But since I’m a glass sculpture, I often have tons of scraps left over and when a fusing doesn’t turn out how I’d like and I can’t sell it, I reuse it by smashing it up with a hammer into bits of glass I can use on my ceramics. I’m solidly anti melting sheet glass or marbles in the bottom of your bowls, or putting marbles on platters to melt etc, I’ve gotten in huge fights with people about this. They are inherently more dangerous than this method because they are much larger pieces of glass that could thermal shock at any time and fragment off and cut someone. So as a handbuilder I make bottles, vases, jars, vessels of various kinds, out of slabs, that I wait until they are just able to stand on their own then roll in the bits of glass, sometimes with some CMC mixed in to help them adhere just at this stage, then when the vessel is leatherhard I manipulate the inside so it forms the shape I want, sometimes using a paddle to help get it were I want it, since a paddle is not going to be hurt by the glass nor leave marks. I let it dry then put on various raku glazes- sometimes just a clear so the glass colors are the complete focus, sometimes I might not have enough color in the glass and will use some colored raku glazes over the glass or as accents around the piece. I fire it in my raku kiln to cone 06 and they turn out very nicely indeed! The raku glaze fluxes the glass, and also merges/melts with the glass, so they do appear to all become on one mass of glass on my wares, and I have never had a chip or anything break off or any problems at all. Maybe because the raku glaze is so low fire the glass and the glaze manage to fit together better and melt into each other, I’m also not using recycled glass of unknown provenance, I am using Bullseye soda lime glass with a COE of 90, whereas bottled glass tends to be quite a bit more refractory. So these are to examples where it works- Steven Branfman has been doing this since I think the ‘80s and I’m pretty sure would have stopped by now if he was having problems with it. I have not been doing it that long because I was just being born then, but it has been working well so far and provides some interesting texture and colors that crystal glazes etc cannot emulate at all. But both these examples are raku, and our OP wants to fire at cone 6, right? Well I would suggest if she pursues this still that she not use mixed recycled glass, but instead finds a local glass artist and buys some of their scraps, so all the glass is the same COE etc and is made of the same ingredients which can prevent many issues. I would probably recommend she consider putting it on something other than a mug that would be used, or at the very least since it sounds like it is for a special friend makes sure that they know it is a decorative mug only and not to be drunk from. It should under no circumstances be put in the dishwasher or microwave. As someone who straddles these two mediums, I have been researching and hoping to eventually find my way into a Phd to research ways to incorporate both ceramics and glass in sculptures, and not just as two separate cast items epoxied together etc but hopefully find a way to make thes two materials work together better…we do know they can do something’s together, and the research I inherited from someone shocked me because in his quest to try and make a self-glazing clay body by mixing large amounts of ground of recycled glass into the clay, he found the more glass he put in the higher he had to actually fire the clay and it would sometimes be so refractory that the clay wouldn’t even flux and mature at cone 10. And sometimes it would melt into a pile of mush…which is how I ended up with this data to do something with because I thought what we needed to do was not use random unknown glass but test specific kinds of glass, most people have no idea how many different kinds of glass there are, just being used for art, let alone everything else. And unfortunately endless seeming stay in the hospital has kept me from starting to do different experiments and come up with a plan of how I want to attack this research, but he found out some really interesting things that I think are going to result in us knowing some very different things about glass and ceramics and hopefully how they might be able to be used together in various ways. It just will take time and patience but I’m assured we will get there.

I think you’ve learned some important things with ceramics in this thread- first, most importantly, always know everything you possibly can about your materials. Just like reading all the MSDS sheets and knowing everything you need to know about oxides you work with in glazes, with stains you always have to read the information easily available about them before you attempt to use them, as they are not completely benign, especially if you screw up and do something like ball mill them into a slip. Secondly, with literally everything in ceramics, you ALWAYS fire a test tile before you do anything else. That is why everyone makes small 100 gram test versions of glazes and fires them, that is why you should absolutely be firing small test amounts of any decorative slip or if you make your own underglazes to see what the percentage of stain you are using looks like fired before you mix up the large amounts. And especially, especially , for colored clay you always always fire pretty small round test tiles to see what the colors will look like, usually using a standardized way of diluting the colorants with the porcelain so you can see gradations of colors , and you can see if there are any problems- but you also absolutely should have known that 1) Mason stains only fire up to 2300F, although some will go up higher. And within the very wide range that they can be fired they will fire at different colors/hues/saturation at different temperatures, so you need to always to a thorough series of test tiles at any temperature you want to fire at, and Mason provides so much important information that it is required you look at each color you are thinking of using, before you even buy it, to make sure you can use it in clay as a body stain or if you want to use it in a glaze that your glaze meets the right requirements. It is also extremely basic knowledge to know what inclusion/encapsulated stains are and how to work with them safely (especially since they are quite expensive!). Before you probably wasted about 25 lb of colored clay, there is a ton of information available on the internet on how to work with colored clays, there area also books and blogs that explain a ton about stains. There are several only classes you can take, YouTube videos, and Chris Campbell, while her course is too rich for my blood & I already probably know everything in her classes, has the first hour of her classes for free where you would have learned most of this really basic foundational knowledge, she also has blogs and written lesson that cover quite a bit of what someone often needs to know starting out (although her paperclay lesson is completely inaccurate and full of misinformation, don’t bother reading that one). I’m afraid in your eagerness you leaped over a bunch of things that you should have taken the time to find out about, instead of actually learning about how to work with stains in clays you simply just made 25 lb of colored clay that you will this time need to TEST before you do anything else, before you add an inclusion stain to ther red clays you mixed up, you need to take the plain porcelain that you use as well as a quarter to dollar sized coin test from every color you have and fire them all at cone 7 or 6, I would recommend cone 7 if possible to start with. With the plain test tile you need to do the absorption test but also, most importantly for how you intend to use these, you need to test how hard they are and how well they will stand up to regular life, one way you can do this that’s a little odd for the situation is the cutlery test, to see if a butter knife leaves marks on it. While this is usually used with glazes I think in this case it will help you know whether the beads will get scratched up after being carelessly tossed into a pile of other jewelry or packed in a small bag with a variety of potentially hard substances. If it scratches and does not seem to have a hard enough surface, I don’t think these will be usable fired lower. The colored test tiles are so that you know what the colors look like at that temperature, and if you do decide to go ahead with this and add an inclusion stain to your red bars, you will once again need to TEST by preparing test tiles with increments of the added inclusion stain and fire those so you can decide what looks best and you use that. As for frit, I use frit myself to make my cone 6 homemade porcelain completely vitrified, but it is not as easy as just adding frit to a regular clay body. You need to know how much feldspar is in the clay body, and usually you need to have around 28-30 feldspar in the clay to get it down to cone 6, which is more than the regular 20-25 feldspar that is in most porcelains. Then what you do normally is remove the amount of feldspar that you are going to substitute frit in for, once you know what the absorption is for the clay with the 28-30 feldspar, and guided by that you usually substitute in between 2-5% frit 3124 (do not use 3110 even if someone tells you to). It is really not as simple as taking a pugged claybody where you don’t know the recipe, and just dumping some amount of frit into it that you guessed. And because you will likely have quite a bit less feldspar, that means you would be adding in quite a bit of frit which gets very expensive. The only way I can see to do this is to test the absorptions of the clay at cone 6 and cone10, then do a line blend starting with 0 frit and adding 2-3 % every test bar, up to potentially 10% frit, and fire them all and test their absorptions. Hopefully you will get lucky and in the line blend will be an amount of frit that produces an absorption of >0.5%. If not, you can keep adding frit, which will get really expensive, or you could try adding some feldspar, again in a line blend, see how low you can get the absorption just with the feldspar, and then at that point do a line blend for adding frit which is hopefully less. Using frit to make a claybody vitrified- the people who talk about it are not at all talking about taking premade up claybodies and doing that, they are talking about how to do it for home made recipes or suppliers who are trying to make a cone 6 version of a popular cone 10 body, they do not mean for you to add it to clay you buy. It’s really complicated as you see, especially since it is extremely rare to know what the recipe of your bought clay is, which you need to do this process. Having just taking CMW’s clay class and learning about it and doing it myself with my own porcelain to get if to vitrifiy at cone 6 instead of 10, it takes a ton of testing and ideally also density tests. I’m lucky in that my cone6 porcelain has a great vitrification curve so it appears I could still use it at cone 10 if I wanted, but most porcelains are not like that. It would also like make a mess of the colored clays she has already made, say she discovers how much feldspar and frit to add to her porcelain to make it, if not vitrified, at least hard and strong enough at cone 6, she has to determine how much dry weight feldspar and frit to wedge into her color blocks, and likely it would change the color of her blocks and she’s have to do test tiles of them all over again to see how they’ve changed and potentially add more stain to them. I wish you luck, try looking before you leap in the future, there are resources and classes and free youtube videos and lessons, and while it can be hard to find these days, there is an extremely excellent book called Colouring Clay by Jo Connell, it is hugely expensive to try and buy used and I had to do inter-library loan to read it, as my own extensive library system for a major city didn’t have it, but you usually can get it through your library and it is very much worth it to learn a ton of information, and especially learn all the beginning things you need to know to get started. I have a list of classes that I am going to be putting up online, Intro to Paperclay if for sure first, and then from a number of people pleading I think I had to bump tile making and mold making higher up on the list, .but this is making me wonder if I shouldn’t put using colored clay as second, while I said there were resources, and god knows I somehow learned it all but a lot of that was self taught and having read so much about everything else that I knew a ton about stains from glaze chemistry, honestly I’m not sure where I picked all the rest of it up. But there are basically two classes online that you can find and they are by well known color clay artists, although one has far more credentials for his artistry than the other one, but they are both quite expensive. I plan on producing really good quality classes but not charge an arm and a leg for them, and have discounts for certain members of society. I plan in making up for not charging as much for them by hopefully getting a lot more students, and also instead of just doing the one class they do offer lots of classes on quite a variety of topics, as a sculptor I have really deep knowledge of a lot of different things that come together in my work, plus I also sculpt in glass so I have additional topics for classes, so far I’ve come up with over 15 classes that I can offer and that isn’t even counting doing some advanced versions of some of them. So I can charge less per class because I will have so many classes that it should even out. So I guess be on the lookout in the next year, for an online class covering colored clay.

You realize that all “raku” clays that are sold are in fact cone 10 stonewares, right? They absolutely do not mature at cone 04-06, you do not want a clay that matures/vitrifies at such low temperatures because it will not be porous enough for smoke from the post-firing reduction to work at all. Most suppliers take a white or off white cone 10 stoneware they already have and add a little more grog or sand to it, if you are lucky they might put in some kyanite or pyrophyllite to really help with the thermal shock. Lots and lots of professional raku artists use various cone 10 or even cone 6 stonewares that are not “raku” clays and produce wonderful work, some, like me, even use porcelain paperclay in raku and manage quite well with it. Some people prefer to not use an advertised raku clay because they may be rougher on the hands if they are doing a lot of wheel work, or have too much grog and sand that when burnishing the pieces prior to doing naked raku the grog will come to the surface or sand will fall out in little chunks, marring the extremely smooth surface they are going for, so they may prefer a stoneware with less grog and no sand. WSO is extremely well known and well regarded in the community for its use in raku, while I refuse to use Laguna clays ever again, it is extremely doubtful that your platters broke because you were using WSO, platters are some of the toughest shapes to get to survive raku just like it is very hard to keep large (or even small) platters from warping and cracking in regular firings, it is extremely hard to heat them completely evenly in the kiln which means when you take them out they are more at risk of breaking from thermal shock including during the post-firing reduction, I would guess that too fast and uneven cooling was the problem with them and there is also a sweet spot with raku for platters or slabs in terms of thickness that is very important as well. Your clay was not the problem. It is perfectly fine to use a stoneware of just about any kind for the most part as a raku clay, and it comes down to individual preference if they need to even add grog or sand to it, and if they do how much, what kind, what size, etc. It can be a trial and error period in the beginning until they dial it in. I use porcelain paperclay primarily with some “raku” clay that I like because it is really really white, but I am developing my own recipe for a white stoneware and one of my planned uses for it is in raku, pit, and saggar firing, sometimes probably as paperclay, other times not, and sometimes with porcelain mixed with it. It will have only a very small amount of molochite in it but I will be subbing a good portion, if not all, of the silica with pyrophyllite so it should do well with thermal shock a lot more than using a lot of grog would provide.

That’s interesting that you say don’t let air in for in-kiln raku reduction, as I’ve been taught you definitely need some air during the kiln reduction or you will not be able to do combustion (as it is essential for combustion), and that a lot of times people stall out their kiln because they’ve reduced the oxygen too much while doing reduction. You certainly are getting some gorgeous copper reds in your raku kiln! For reduction in the kiln, I reduce the air enough that my glaze is a messy orange flame, but usually don’t completely cover the flue entirely, and monitor with my pyrometer that while the reduction is happening I’m either still climbing with temp if that is what I want, but usually I’m doing it at a point where I just want to keep the temperature were it is as, so I am making sure that the temp isn’t dropping, and if it starts to I add a little oxygen back in. Raku is completely my first time doing any kind of reduction (not counting SiC) with a kiln myself, as I have never had a gas kiln and the few places I took some classes didn’t teach us anything about firing. I’ve learned a lot about firing through books, and also some excellent YouTube videos, but they are all about how to fire a normal gas kiln, and not a raku kiln. Obviously I have learned and read a lot about raku firings, but the books make doing 20-30 minutes of reduction really easy. One way that I do reduction in the kiln that is really easy is to do soda firing (mixed with some borax), as I really enjoy the effects the soda makes especially on unglazed pots and slip covered pots, and with adding the borax to the soda I just almost get close to a glaze forming. It immediately makes the kiln extremely reduced, and turns any copper containing glazed pots copper red right away. I have a fiber kiln I made that I coated in rigidizer (it was necessary as my kiln is built with rings, so I can have it be normal sized and not waste propane for regular sized pots, but since I have a kiln now that I can fire things on their sides to 43 inches I wanted to be able to fire 43 inch tall sculpture and even some pots. The rigidizer helps me create kind of a roll of the ceramic fiber on the bottom and tops so the rings will sit on each other so I can easily change sizes) and I also have ITC-100 coating the kiln, so I’m hopeful both those things will help protect the fiber from the soda. I don’t do it as often as I would like as, despite the fact my raku books casually talk about throwing salt or soda in the kiln no big deal, without any of the warnings about the damage those two can do to fiber or soft brick kilns, or the fact that it will always be a bit of a soda kiln because it will be absorbed and volatize from the bricks/fiber (although I’m hoping my coatings is preventing some of that) they also don’t mention anything about the need to scrape your shelves thoroughly after doing a raku soda firing! At least I know enough to be doing these things to protect it as much as possible. Right now my only real downside for reduction firing in my raku kiln is everyone everywhere is out of burners, I’m on a list with Ward Burner to get a double set of raku M100s when they get them available again, and very sadly missed by just 2 days the last M100 (for the best price I’ve ever seen) being sold from ClayPlanet, and everyone else is out. Someone from my state who I met in a Facebook group for Twin Cities Clay Makers provided me with information on how to make my own, which he had done for his homemade stoneware temp firing gas kiln, but that design did not have a primary air intake like the Venturi burners do, which I really want, so it was easier and possibly cheaper for me to just buy a weed burner, which means I can only adjust the flame by adjusting the amount of fuel plus of course secondary air inputs. I know a lot of people fire raku for years with weed burners and love it and find no need to upgrade to a Venturi burner, but I really want that primary air intake to be the way I adjust the flame, not the amount of fuel, as it should significantly save on the amount of propane used. I’m getting two since Ward Burner is set up that if you buy a second one with all the include double amount of hoses etc it is only $90 more than buying one! And I have plans to make a version of Ian Gregory’s flat pack kiln where I can fire various sized sculptures, up to 6 ft or bigger, and the person I spoke to at Ward Burner said with the amount of cubic feet those could potentially take, although I can adjust the kiln so it is exactly the right size for the sculpture and no bigger, I might need a second burner for some of those especially if I am wanting to get to cone 6 or even maybe cone 10, and it seems much smarter knowing that is in my future to get the extra burner for very cheap now, instead of paying $250 for a second one later. And if I win the lottery and am able to buy a permanent kiln big enough for my sculptures that I make in sections now, well then I can always sell the second burner easily. No way to lose. Damn this supply shortage for everything, no one seems to even know why Venturi burners aren’t being made or what is going on, I know I would be having a lot smoother firings with raku if I had a Venturi burner instead of the weed burner. As to your first sentence, I have always maintained that tin is essential for copper reds and glazes that have copper in them in raku that are multicolored, I don’t question that, although it has been super interesting learning the chemistry better for why that is so. It is just the recipes that don’t have copper in them that have tin, where it is not being using for opacifying, that I don’t know if it is actually necessary or just a hold over from an earlier version of the recipe. I guess I might just try and avoid those recipes altogether, and stick with the recipes I know produce amazing colors, like Dry Alligator, and Rick’s Turquoise and I have a few others, plus a few different shades of turquoise or aqua and some copper and/or red lusters. It will be hard to restrain myself, because I love trying new glazes so much, and adjusting them etc, but with those plus clear and white crackle, naked raku, and using up some of the cone 06 glazes that I’ll never use otherwise I have plenty of variety in surfaces. I’ve also been considering trying out some midfire glazes like Steven Branfman does, under a clear raku glaze, to see what effects I get. While I want to become very good at raku, I started it with the express purpose to help my perfectionism my knowing for a long time I’m going to be ruining, cracking, breaking etc lots of pots, or just having some turn out just ugly…not that I can’t refire in some cases, but for my sculpting and just my life long over achiever/perfectionism personality I need to get less attached to my work and know that I can just suck at stuff until I hopefully at some point get good. Raku and pitfiring every Friday if I can is helping me internalize the lessons that you can try and control what you can, but that a lot of what happens in ceramics is not under your control. And when I do have something work out it is so much sweeter. So plenty of experimentation…. I would use newspapers but honestly I don’t even know where to find them anymore??? Long ago gave up weekly newspaper delivery, even before news on the internet was quite so prominent, because I have a cat who loves the texture of newspaper very much in a bad way, where anytime a newspaper or shiny advertisement fell on the floor he would immediately go pee on it. Minneapolis used to have lots of stands with various free newspapers in them, that I could have raided for free, but those have all shut down and I never see free newspapers anymore. There is a local neighborhood newspaper that is delivered like once a month, I suppose I could call them up and ask them if they have extra newsprint as I’ve heard when they print newspapers there is usually some extra blank paper that just gets recycled. Right now I am using sawdust and sometimes some wood chips, depending on the piece, and I try and seal the metal container by wrapping old wet towels around the lid, which has been working fantastically at reducing smoke to almost nothing (I’m in a very urban place and I can get away with my pitfires since we are allowed to have backyard fires in Minneapolis, only needing a permit if it is a really huge bonfire, although since I put so many metal salts etc with fumes in them I’m just waiting for one of my neighbors to complain to the city about me, but so far so good as they don’t spend hardly anytime outside at night) as well as providing a lot of reduction post fire, sometimes especially if I’m trying to keep part of it oxidized & turquoise, it is really too much reduction, so I have been going through some trial and error with doing a quick cooling in air before putting it in the reduction container, or spraying that part with water, but I am also, maybe more than I should be, burping the lids sometimes to have parts oxidize, as otherwise I try when possible to just let the piece cool down naturally in the container until it is ready to be taken out and further cooled in the air the last little bit, especially as I don’t have nearly as many reduction containers as I’d like so I need to be able to reuse them with the next batch coming out of the kiln most of the time. I adore the horsehair raku look, especially as I grew up with horses, but the only person in my life these days with horses who could give me a plentiful supply is rather flaky and I can’t count on her. I hate to have to pay for something that should be so easy to get free, but does anywhere sell horse hair that I can use? I also have been wondering where people get feathers for it, as the Migratory Bird Act prohibits collecting and using any feathers from birds that migrate, which covers most wild birds, so you can’t just go hiking and collect feathers for use as you do. Unless you are a Native American ceramic artist, in which case you have the right to use bird feathers as you see fit! I’ve been trying without success to figure out where people are getting feathers from. If I can’t get horsehair, I’ve been wondering if the thin immature grape vines in my yard might not provide a very similar look, that might even be hard to tell the difference from horsehair? Or maybe I have to just invent something of my own, using various plants along with sugar to create interesting looks…I’m really bummed because before I became a full time sculptor, I was a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist and professor, and had also spent a lot of time working in zoos and wildlife sanctuaries. I have a ton of friends who are zoo vets. I have contacted them on Facebook, asking if they could ask their zoo Director if they could perhaps collect some hair, feathers, snake skins and other reptile shed skins, and maybe some other cool shed body stuff, and that I would donate half the price of the piece when it sold to the zoo, and that it would come with descriptions of which species were not harmed in the process from which zoo, and also that I would donate some of the pots to be sold in their gift shops, which considering the popularity of horsehair raku I think they would sell like hotcakes. I tried telling them that these pieces tend to fetch pretty good prices, and it would be good advertisement for their zoo. And literally not one of my zoo vet friends would respond at all- they would respond to other things I interacted with them , but not that at all about that request- which I specified I would be looking for things from animals not on the endangered list but that are commonly in zoos. I think they don’t understand, even though I showed them pictures, what I was asking for and didn’t want to go to their directors with a request, even though they would get, potentially eventually a substantial, amount of donations and plus keeping full price of the ones I would donate for them to sell in their gift shops, which would stand out so much from other zoos and could even get press. But I think they can’t see the big picture. I have one friend with a snake who has promised me her sheds, although with only one snake that is few and far between. And I can’t even get horse hair! Ridiculous. I know some people use their own hair, but mine is too short and though I have a lot of hair, apparently an exceptional amount of hair according to my stylist, each strand is actually very fine, so if I grew it out long enough they wouldn’t be thick enough to show up. I’ve got endless amounts of cat hair but that isn’t going to work!

I will keep this in mind for the other two saucers if the sintering doesn’t work. Brushes are my weakness for tools, I am constantly buying new ones and new sets, even though I’ve barely used the set I just got before! And with me starting a specific body of work very different than the rest of my work, where I want to do majolica on cone 6 black stoneware (leaving parts of the clay uncovered or carved so that it is obvious I am not using terra cotta) I’ve become obsessed with buying lots of calligraphy brushes, having found out they are really the best for doing that kind if painting, and that they hold a lot of paint/glaze so you don’t run out when making a long line…so I don’t have much in the way of old stiff scraggly brushes- probably one or two old wide wall paint brushes in the basement, otherwise I had gotten rid of any brushes I couldn’t recondition so I could buy more, good quality brushes for pretty much every possibility…except this apparently! I do have quite a few of the extremely inexpensive chip brushes from the hardware store in different sizes that I had bought for applying silicone to models for molds (since I am also a glass caster and usually make a master mold, and sometimes I make master molds for models for my plaster molds, but I tend to just have around 5 or so plaster casting molds going at any one time, for strata casting, so each casting has unique layers and colors of porcelain and the carvings revealing those colors are always unique, and to keep things fresh when I get bored with a casting type I just throw the mold away and make some new ones, with the idea that these are all limited edition unique castings, so a master mold in that situation is usually a waste of time and expensive silicone!). The chip brushes are pretty stiff and with some extra bending and beating up by me might work. I could potentially try it out on a smaller piece, bigger than a test tile but not one of the actual saucers, with the same texture, to see how that works. My sense is that there would probably be a good amount of the high points that wouldn’t get wax on them and would be black, and that the wax would also seep into the valleys preventing the black from getting in there. This had actually been one of my first ideas for a way to try and avoid 3 firings, but I just didn’t think it would work. I had also considered doing sort of the opposite, using one of my thin liner brushes and carefully putting wax on each ridge, but that would be so incredibly time consuming I rejected it. When it comes to painting or Sgraffito I can really get into a lot of detail work, but I think this is one of those things where it would just be too much!

Wow, my question brought up some super deep glaze knowledge that I have not come across and I am really glad to have learned this, especially as one of my projects when I’m out of the hospital is developing some better cone 6 silicon carbide/oxidation copper reds (real deep oxblood reds). I still do have to complain though that with a ton of raku glazes tin is put in in fairly large amounts in a lot of recipes that don’t even have any copper, and where it is definitely not being used as an opacifier. I don’t know if this is a case of a lot of recipes changing hands and getting modified over the years, which may have started out with copper in them or needing an opacifier, and other ingredients and colorants got added and other subtracted and the tin was just left in because people thought why not, it isn’t going to hurt anything, or it doesn’t make that much of a difference, except it is really hard when looking at some of these recipes to get a sense, especially since many are multi-color or turquoise recipes, when indeed the tin may make a difference (I mean in a lot of cases if you add a little tin, and some titanium, and some rutile, you can make magical things happen to glazes) or not, so it is really frustrating. A lot of these glazes I will look at and say if this was a cone 06 or cone 6 glaze it would definitely not need tin, but I worry about pulling it from a lot of them and then maybe missing out on some great effects, in at least some of them potentially. Because it is just so damn expensive I can’t be putting tin in recipes where it likely doesn’t need it. The tricky thing is with raku and post-firing reduction, test tiles can give you complete misinformation, as a lot of these glazes look very different each time they are fired and reduced, depending on a whole lot of factors including the weather. Even doing small test pots with versions of the glazes with and without tin may be misleading, especially as I am not super experienced in raku and am still working on my post-firing reduction technique and deciding which combustibles I like best, which can also change how a glaze will turn out if you use something different for certain glazes once you have enough experience with them to know that.

Sintering it is a really great idea, I think I will try that out. I’ve mentioned a few times that I make my mason stains 1:2 with FF 3124 and water, I don’t ever use mason stains with just water, so it should be plenty sticky and have a bit of flow and even gloss, since 3124 at temps like 06 is in fact a complete glaze within itself. I try and avoid using Gillespie borate (don’t have access to Gerstley locally anymore) with the stains if I can because I find it gels up the mixture more than I usually want for what I’m doing, but it is also an option especially for people who are having trouble getting frits right now. I really like this idea- I’ll have the two others glazed in case for some reason this doesn’t work. I need to start thinking of some creative ideas of what to do with the hopefully superfluous extras I’m making, if I have one or two left over that are perfectly good I feel like I would need to make some planters for myself that would fit these saucers, or, since the rest of my work in made in paperclay, and you can add wet paperclay to glazed clay, even if it isn’t paperclay, I could use these or carefully broken parts of them added to a paperclay sculpture, wallhanging…something. I really really hate wasting clay and while I marvel at the really cool chemistry that is vitrification (or I guess actually sintering at lowfire temps) I wish there was some way to have your clay turn ceramic permanently but also have something you could dip it in or spray it on that reverses the process and the clay could be recycled and used for something useful. But probably the simplest thing if I ::knock on wood:: have extras would be to make some planters for myself that match, I’m positive my mom would have plenty of plants that could go in them. Thank you so much for the sintering idea! I don’t know why I don’t think of sintering things more often, there are a lot of good reasons to do so!

You may have missed the parts where I have said that the glaze is extremely opaque, that I even put on two washes under the glaze on the actual moon jar and not a damn thing showed through at all. I also slapped my forehead because I wasn’t thinking at all when I said I could fill the kiln up with test tiles, since I fire at cone 6 I really don’t have any cone 06 glazes that needed to be tested and while I will have likely some of the earthenware clay left over not enough to make a ton of test tiles, and I don’t want to waste my dwindling supply of good raku clay I love on test tiles for glazes I won’t use. I figure I will probably make a few mugs (the exception to my absolutely no mugs rule is for myself, and most of our hodgepodge of commercial mugs have broken so I could use a few more for using for me tea- ones that won’t be allowed to be used for the cat’s water, since all 4 cats refuse to drink out of bowls or even fountains they will only drink out of cups and mugs, because they think they are drinking out of what we are drinking out of, weirdos). I know that each individual kiln firing is not a huge huge amount of electricity, but I am trying to save on that as much as I can, the kiln I’ll be using is absolutely huge unfortunately. As for the glaze, no more layers does not make it darker. I really don’t see how I would end up with doing it 6 times if I don’t test it, I am doing something I have done a hundred times, brushing on stain with some frit to emphasize the texture and wiping off the high points, I could do it in my sleep, and while very close up you’ll be able to see it from farther away it will just look darker. I’m only doing the other two saucers not because I’m worried about the stain but because of anything else that could go wrong that would make me happy to have a couple extras- a crack, a chip, etc. As a sculptor I have an extremely large number of glazes I work with, I don’t have a large enough studio to have very many in buckets as there just isn’t space for that, so only a chosen few get to be in buckets. Most of the others I have already made up are kept in quart sized yogurt containers or gallon sized old kitty litter containers. These are for my medium to small scale work and tile and wall panels, with quart and pint containers housing my many different colored slips (which I use a lot, I love love love slip), homemade underglazes, and colored terra sig. For the majority of my work which is large scale- as 5-6 ft or even more, I mix up the glazes I want to use on the sculpture in the amount I need, and save any left over in the smaller containers. Because I can very easily do things with glazes, and don’t have a set palette like a lot of people because that would just not work with how I work, I have no problems making up new or different glazes for commissions or custom work. Remember as a sculptor who only rarely makes utilitarian work, commissions and custom work for me are usually quite different than requests from a customer to make a mug in a certain color or something. I assume that for a lot of commissions and public art that I will have to even develop new glazes in order to make work that is satisfactory. I have no problem with that, especially since contracts are my best friend, where I get to lay out that I will do my best to achieve certain colors if those are requested, but due to the nature of glaze making that I may not be able to achieve the exact color requested, but will try to get as close as is possible. Really, I think a lot of advice for custom work for potters doesn’t translate over to sculptors very well. Our commissioned and custom work is very different, often architectural or public art, where contracts spell things out very well and protect the artist from pretty much all of the situations that seem to bug potters. For fun and relaxation I do make a tiny amount of functional work, just because I like the forms, or for vases I can make them very sculptural, and I can also for some things use glazes that I would rarely get to use on sculptures but really like, like floating blue for example. But each piece is a one off and not repeated, except for the occasional sets of stemless wineglasses I make, but each set is unique and will never be sold with that glaze combo again. Because it is important to me that any of those things are unique, I won’t take custom requests on those. This situation is unique for me because I would only do this for this specific friend, just like I am willing to make a set of custom mugs for him but would never do that for anyone else…unless they are handing me a suitcase with a million dollars in it. I do the functional work because it is fun and often creates canvases that I can go crazy with surface decoration, lots of slips and underglazes and seemingly clashing designs but as one of my mentors says I’m like a jazz musician who can take the disparate melodies and make them work together to create something that she says is a Tour de Force piece. Or having the chance to do intricate Sgraffito, that and carving are quite literally my favorite things to do in sculpting, but when I’m making 6 ft tall sculptures I have a lot less opportunity to do Sgraffito and while I can do some carving not usually very intricate carving with a lot of piercing and so forth…the pieces are just too big and it would take too long to do those things, although I do try and do some of it, but they tend to me long lines that cover large spaces instead of what you can do with Sgraffito on a cup, a plate, a platter etc. But back to my original point, I love glazes and have so many different colors I want to use, more than I get the chance to, plus add in my wide palette of colored slips, terra sigs, and underglazes- since I make them myself with mason stains using Vince Pitelka’s recipe(s) from Glazy, I have way more options than those using commercial underglazes, and for 1/5 the price, if I was a functional potter I would be very unlikely to have an actual “glaze stable” as for fun I am always trying new glazes, using SiC on reduction glazes, doing line blends and triaxial and quadraxial blends to adjust a glaze or try and find a new one, so I would likely jump at the chance to do some custom work with a different color/glaze, if it is a color I like- I’d probably say no to yellows or oranges. But I would have a short contract spelling out the possible limitations and what the client’s backup choice is for a glaze, and depending on how much work I would have to do charge accordingly for the time spent on the glaze. But I look at someone like Joe Thompson, who has invented a crazy number of glazes in the last few years, and always very generously shares them on Glazy and his blog for everyone to use, he loves the process of developing new glazes and has a real knack for it, and he then gets to offer more of his limited amount of functional pieces he offers in these colors, so I could see someone like that enjoying the challenge of trying to develop a new glaze for a client who wants something specific knowing that if I would succeed in making the glaze, or close enough to it, I would increase my money making opportunities, but again have boundaries with the client that they are paying extra for the glaze research time and testing and that if I am not successful they either need to have a backup glaze they are happy with or a quit fee for the project if they would rather not have anything at all. Part-time for a few years towards the end of my scientific career I did some scientific/medical writing, and I learned a lot about contracts and how important it is to build very detailed requirements on the clients part and what they want very clearly spelled out, with all my limitations spelled out if some things can’t be delivered on, but being paid appropriately for the amount of work especially if there is more work than is typical for a project, charging a project fee, having that fee paid in three installments, 1/3 up front, 1/3 at a certain point of deliverables, and 1/3 on final delivery of the product. And to have a kill fee in it if the client wants to terminate the project that I get paid for however much work I’ve already put into it including calculating in that while I was working on that I could have been working on something that would have gone to completion and paid me more since that would have been finished and I would have gotten the entire payment. Ceramic artists need to be embracing this model and get paid partly upfront, especially if it requires you to get any materials you don’t normally have on hand, at some kind of middle point, and then on final delivery of the product. And if custom work requires extra effort on your part of any kind, whether that is using a glaze you don’t usually use so you have to do some test tiles, a test bowl, and then possibly the BWIC, microwave, cutlery etc tests if you need to determine its durability and whether it can be used on food surfaces, then that should be factored into the price. I can’t think of any other industry or artistic practice where it isn’t already assumed on the part of the client that asking for custom work means you are going to be paying more. I have an addiction to gorgeous Indigenous made earrings I developed during the Pandemic as a weird way of coping with the Pandemic stress, and if I ask for something custom, colors or something, I assume I will be paying more. Sometimes I don’t, especially if I ask to buy a set of earrings that has already been bought and the artist offers to make a custom set similar in design to those earrings but lets me pick colors or length or width more, they may sometimes just charge what that original set of earrings cost, but I never assume that will be the case. If you want to talk to me at the next NCECA look for the white woman with either black or turquoise hair who is wearing every day beautiful, often very long, Native earrings…

I’m moving away from using any commercial products, so while I still have some underglaze to finish up using, I make my own underglaze now from a recipe on glazy that comes from ‘70s Mason stain company via Vince Pitelka, it has three separate parts that are mixed together, and with the liquid underglaze brushing formula he developed (a mix of propylene glycol and CMC and water) for painting it is quite quite thick, like slow moving lava, but brushes on like a dream and is especially great for majolica. Plus it costs about 1/4 or 1/5 the cost of commercial underglaze, and you have basically an infinite palette from the stains, especially since if you vary the amount of stain you put in you get different colors, and they blend really great plus at least the Mason stain company has a ridiculous number of colors. And the CMC and propylene glycol help it stay on the pot really well. I haven’t tried airbrushing those yet, certainly they can be thinned with water I just don’t know if for some colors they would be thinned so much to fit through the nozzle that they wouldn’t provide enough coverage. But I imagine that is also an issue with regular underglazes…of which this recipe is really very close to how they make commercial underglazes, the dry part has frit and kaolin which is a big part of underglazes plus a lot of stain and CMC, and that is really what most underglazes are made of. The difference with Vince’s version is really the propylene glycol, which really makes a difference in having it paint on like butter, but is a lot thicker than how commercial underglazes are formulated. I guess I’ll just have to play around with it and see what colors work thinned out and which ones don’t, or if they need additional stain added to the thinned mixture….But I couldn’t be happier having this recipe for underglazes, saves me so much money, works super well, and most colors work at any cone without the changes in color you tend to see with other underglazes when used at different cones.

I look at it a little differently maybe because I am a sculptor and really only make one-off unique pieces. So I actually would love to have tons of commissions. For sculpting, a lot of commissions are for organizations or companies, or as a public sculpture, so there is something of a formal process for which I get paid (most of the time, unless it is something I submitted a design for and was selected and they have a set stipend/award) the same way I did as a scientific consultant- with a project fee, paid in thirds at different points. I require in the contract a great deal of artistic freedom and the final say when it comes to most design things. If they are coming to me, they like my style (which has a lot of variety, so is not necessarily something where you can point at something and say, oh obviously that’s a Tauer sculpture- has to do with my ADHD). The main run through my work is that they are what a great sculptor in the paperclay community that I belong to, who is a professor, called Tour de Force sculptures, even when they look nothing alike. And she has begged me to keep making Tour de Force sculptures, keep going larger even though I’m already doing 6 ft tall sculptures! And when I do something medium or smaller, she insists it has to be very technically difficult or look like it isn’t obeying the laws of physics, and her advice was the most flattering things anyone has ever said about my work so I’m happy to follow her advice. So when I take custom or commission work, which I really love and honestly wished I got a ton more of, I’m often getting the chance to be paid for something very large that I would want to make anyway but am certain I’ll be paid for it instead of making it and hoping to find a buyer. I have some tiny exceptions, like I have a friend who was the first person to buy work from me professionally and paid me over 3 times what I asked for it with a note that I need to charge more for my work, and who has been extremely supportive of my career, more supportive than all my family members. So when he asked me if I could make him a set of 4 mugs, even though I have a hard and fast rule that I absolutely do not make mugs, and in general make just a tiny fraction of work that is in any way functional, and that is only because I particularly like certain shapes like pitchers and I can make really interesting sculptural vases. But I said yes to him because after all he’s done for me I am certainly not going to tell him I don’t make mugs so I won’t do that for him. I also know that with him he’ll give me all the time in the world, and while it takes rather some effort to pull out any ideas from him of what kind of mugs he wants, I know that I really will have total artistic freedom. And that he will pay me far more than they are worth. I also know I can have fun with them and do crazy surface decoration, so I look at it a little like play. But I wouldn’t do that for anyone else. I’m really trying to actually work harder at getting more commissions, but have no problem with other cases of saying no when it isn’t something that I will make or like some others have said copying someone else’s style. I otherwise think commissions are usually a way for me to grow as an artist, there are often some technically challenging things I have to figure out, and much like graphic design it is a good skill to build to learn how to take what the client thinks they want and instead give them what they really want, and to interpret their goals in a way that pleases them but is still your decision as an artist. I think if I was a potter, that I would still like and want custom work, as long as it followed certain rules, as it can grow your followers and collectors, and provide challenges and even learning to make new forms that then can go on to potentially become very popular sellers etc. I think it is entirely personal and no one has to justify why or why not they take commissions. From the posts I have read, people do it in quite a few different ways and for different reasons, I don’t think it should be a requirement for anyone. I personally with other sculptors I know tend to see them have attitudes similar to me, but we also have a fairly different business model than potters in a lot of ways, and our training often incorporates the idea of commissions so it is something we learn early and tend to expect and want as a part of our income stream. Potters tend to sell differently and also have a slimmer margin because they are putting out so much at a time, where as most sculptors have a lot lower production. I do subscribe, when possible (depending on the size and difficulty of something, it isn’t always possible) to make more than one in case something disastrous or even just minor but enough to ruin the work happens. Certainly for anything small I make multiples, although they may not be possible to be exactly the same.

I do airbrush, more and more actually, so I would very much be interested, just for future projects, how you highlight and shadow without wiping!