Raw glazing

[blackeyenabi]

I would like to raw glaze porcelain paper clay and wanted to use a flat black glaze that I could use in a gray scale by using varying solutions of glaze and water. I've never done anything with ceramics/glaze before. Is this possible, does anyone have a glaze to suggest? 

[Babs]

Watering down a glaze to get an ombre effect wont work imo

You would have to get a base glaze suited to raw glazing, opaque or transparent, ,then add an increasing/ decreasing amount of black stain to containers of the base, test tlies and firing to see what is best for your piece.

Glazes work best at a certain Specific gravity , that is why they dont like watering down...

[Bill Kielb]

6 hours ago, blackeyenabi said:

I would like to raw glaze porcelain paper clay and wanted to use a flat black glaze that I could use in a gray scale by using varying solutions of glaze and water. I've never done anything with ceramics/glaze before. Is this possible, does anyone have a glaze to suggest? 

I don’t have a favorite glaze but the graded effect might  be considered ombre. We used to do this routinely with underglaze and  some glazes by spraying for a very custom graded look. Always sprayed from darkest to lightest and controlled the spray pattern very precisely while thinning the glaze / underglaze as you go.

[Babs]

 are you thinning the layer of glaze or the actual glaze

[blackeyenabi]

I was hoping to achieve the ombre effect mentioned, I see what you mean about the specific gravity, thank you all for your feedback. I am completely inexperienced and need all the help I can get. Was planning on doing test tiles until I got it down. I think I'd use a transparent glaze then add increasing amounts of stain, I guess to achieve ombre(?) 

[Callie Beller Diesel]

The thing to remember is that glaze does not behave like paint. Adding water will only make it more translucent, which will lead more of the clay body to show through. Because clay bodies aren’t perfectly white like paper, this doesn’t make the colour appear less saturated, it just shows off a brownish, partially fluxed clay body. 

If you were to go for an ombré effect, you’d be more likely to achieve it by spraying a white glaze over a black glaze, using the airbrush to make your gradients. Greys are notoriously tricky as well. Using a black and white to make a grey can have mixed results. Sometimes you have to work with grey Mason stains in order to get the results you like. You can create grey with the right combination of oxides, but the oxides for grey are more hazardous to the potter than the stains. 

[Bill Kielb]

2 hours ago, blackeyenabi said:

I was hoping to achieve the ombre effect mentioned, I

Here an interesting recent post, very cool for certain looks:  https://community.ceramicartsdaily.org/topic/24729-not-sure-what’s-going-wrong-with-this-glaze/?do=findComment&comment=199502

For more dramatic effect we used underglaze, especially for color change gradation. Backgrounds have a large effect as has been mentioned here. Often you are depending on the base color and subtractive or filtered color influence on it so to speak.