- All of you should have gotten at least something
bisque fired in the first bisque firing.
And you'll see now that they are
kind of Band-aid, Barbie, Pepto-Bismol pink
and they're a lot harder than they were.
The next thing to get excited about
is to dress them up with glaze.
That's the next step.
So today I want to introduce you to Santa Fe's glazes
and how we glaze things.
Glaze is not the same as paint.
Paint is the stuff on the wall.
Paint happens on canvas next door.
Paint is a room temperature thing.
Glaze is melted glass
that fuses with the clay of your piece.
Really, clay and glaze are the same ingredients,
but in different proportions.
This is also alumina and silica and
ingredients called fluxes to make things melt
at the temperature we fire to at Santa Fe,
which is cone 6.
Remember, we talked about cone numbers
and the zeros and the...
We bisque fire to 06, we glaze to 6.
And they are different temperatures,
different kiln firings entirely.
I think of putting glaze on pots
as dressing them to advantage.
You know, there are qualities of your pot
that you may want to emphasize.
There are things you might want to hide.
There are things that you can do with color in glaze,
just like you learn in painting class,
the color theory things still hold true.
For example, light colors advance and dark colors recede.
Warm and cool, all those color rules are still in the mix.
But in addition, something I forgot to mention,
there's a light switch right here.
You get to turn it on.
And it helps a little bit to see these tiles.
These fired tiles are examples
of what our shop glazes looked like fired.
And that's for your information to help you make decisions.
Because the glazes in the big buckets
in their raw state do not look at all anything
like what they're gonna look like.
So you have to use your mind's eye a lot.
And the first time you ever glaze anything
is gonna feel like jumping off the high bar,
you know, the high dive in the dark.
And you just have to do it once and then you'll learn
and go from there.
When you're looking at the glazed tiles,
start where the red arrow is.
See that big red arrow?
Right by that it's a shop glazes overlapping themselves.
And what that means,
each one of these tiles has got the name of the glaze,
the same name as what's on the bucket.
Here is tea dust.
Dip one is the bottom of the tile.
Dip two is the side of the tile.
So this would tell you what
the same glaze looks like thin and thick.
And also tells you how it reacts to texture
because all the tiles have the same texture on them.
Tea dust is a really cool, kind of burnt caramel brown,
semi translucent with gold flakes in it.
How cool is that?
They're actually iron magnesium crystals.
And it's called tea dust because that's its name.
It's its sort of generic category of glazes
that have flecks or dusty looking gold aspects.
So that's what this tile looks like.
They're all labeled on the back.
So if you take it down to look at it,
put it back in the right place.
- [Man] Can you turn off that light for me?
It might interrupt the audio.
All right, talk for me one more time.
- I am sorry that that light isn't better than it is.
This is a dark corner.
Some of these tiles are kinda high up.
I have no officially recommended way
for you to climb up there and look at them closely.
But we do have a step ladder,
and this table will bear my weight, just saying.
But I cannot officially recommend you climb up
to take a look 'cause that wouldn't be safe.
Anyway, these two rows here are all the shop glazes
from black through tomato red,
kind of almost sort of organized as a spectrum
from red through yellow, to green, to blue, to purple
with all these light colored neutrals underneath.
The other tiles are shop glazes
with each other over and under.
For example, this batch says "Oatmeal with,"
and then all the other glazes are named.
So if I want to know
what oatmeal and variegated blue look like together,
the main glaze in this batch is oatmeal.
It's oatmeal with everything else.
So dip number one was oatmeal.
Dip number two on the side is variegated blue.
And then dip number three on top is oatmeal again.
So this one tile shows you what oatmeal looks like,
what variegated blue looks like by itself,
what variegated blue looks like over oatmeal,
and what variegated blue looks like under oatmeal.
Sometimes it makes a big difference which one's on top.
Because the glazes do have
chemical interactions with each other.
And you can see right here that variegated blue
on top of oatmeal doesn't really change a whole lot.
But look at here, that's different.
That's more blue and speckledy looking
and it's got more texture and depth to it.
So that tells you if you like that corner,
you put the oatmeal on first and that, no, no.
Variegated blue first and then oatmeal.
And all the tiles are dipped in that same order.
So this is one, two, three.
I try to make it so simple that it'll give you information.
These tiles will also tell you not only color
but degree of transparency.
And also whether they change a lot in color
or some other property according to thickness.
For example, spodumene
is an odd-ball glaze.
It's kind of a little bit shiny,
but it's a more stony surface.
It doesn't look like hard candy.
It doesn't look wet.
It's a brownish pinkish orange color where it's thin.
But where it's thick, it's a creamy white.
So it gets lighter when it's thicker.
It shows texture really well,
but it shows texture in kind of an opposite way
than other glazes,
'cause the thicker it is the lighter it is.
This is kind of counterintuitive in a way.
But spodumene is named after the main ingredient
in the glaze.
Most of the other glazes,
when I've had to make up a name for them, I go to food.
You know, honey butter, oatmeal,
tomato, curry, spearmint,
eggnog.
So that's what most of these tiles represent.
I do not yet have a complete set
of everything with everything else, but I'm working on it.
The big bucket glazes are complete in themselves.
They have colorant, glass former.
If you dip a pot in one of the big bucket glazes,
you may be all done.
The reason I mention that is that we also have
commercial underglazes that come in these jars.
It says velvet underglazes violet.
That's the official word for purple.
We've got all these colors.
These are the underglazes here on this bottom row.
The advantage of underglazes is they are pretty much
the color they're going to be
because they're just colorant and binder.
The underglazes are called under glazes
because if you want them to be shiny or glassy,
you have to put clear glaze on top.
There's no glass former in the underglazes.
They're just colorant.
So the advantage of those is,
particularly in a hand-building class
with maybe somebody has made a clay still life
and they want the apples to look like apples
and the pear to look like a pear.
You have the advantage of being able to see the color
as you're applying it.
The disadvantages are
they're really expensive and pretty toxic.
And they're kind of like crayons, you know.
Speaking for myself personally,
I am really entranced with the dynamics of melting glass
and coating pottery with a combination of these glazes
that will melt together and do dynamic things.
And the big bucket glazes often look really deep
and they surprise you and they're wonderful
and luscious, or hideous.
But there's more magic for me personally,
partly because you can't see what you're doing
while you're doing it.
You turn it over to the kiln and magic happens.
Anyway, if you have a very good art reason
to need a spot of fire engine red, though, we have it.
And these tiles are here to show you
what those underglazes look like fired.
Here's the red.
And it's a little dusty, but you can see
these are all tiles with underglaze brushed on.
And then the second, the side is dipped in the clear glaze.
Some of them, the clear glaze not only makes it shiny,
but pops up the color quite a bit.
Now I just got it wet,
but the color is more intense under the clear glaze.
And that's available to you.
When I mentioned toxicity,
it's not because we worry about whether
the cadmium, selenium, chrome, vanadium, all those things
are soluble on your pot after it's been fired.
The legal department of that company
has taken care of that issue.
What they have not taken care of is,
say, you spill some on the table and it dries
and then becomes dust and becomes airborne
and we breathe it.
Or what happens to it after you wash your brush out
and it goes down the sink and ends up in Paynes Prairie.
Those are toxicity issues
that I think we should think about.
Did that make sense so far?
Okay.
What I'd like to do now is show you the basic introduction
to how to glaze our pots.
And I would like you to write a couple lists down
because some of you will have made things
that have texture decoration of one kind or another.
The list of glazes that are transparent,
that means you can see through them,
that you would be able to see texture decoration through
include clear,
let's see, spearmint, lagoon.
Lagoon is a very popular transparent glaze.
It's an aquamarine turquoise kind of color.
Other transparent ones include tea dust,
although it's kind of dark, and bone.
Bone is clear with a little bit of yellowish cast to it.
So it was a little bit toned down.
So those are the ones that are actually transparent.
Other ones that show texture really well
but are opaque yet show texture,
show texture because they change according to thickness.
A really exciting one of those is slate blue.
Slate blue is not only darker where it's thick,
but it's shinier where it's thick.
And it's lighter and more matte where it's thin.
And it's a nice, to my Yankee eyeball,
subdued compound mixed color, a grayish blue green.
And it's wonderful over texture.
I already talked about spodumene emphasizing texture.
White and curry and honey butter and warm stone,
they all show texture to some degree.
And that's what the tiles are good for,
to let you know that.
Some of them are really opaque and they cover everything up.
And any texture decoration you put underneath
is gonna be maybe just look a little bit lumpy.
Like glossy black and, well, eggnog.
Certainly Jade.
Jade covers everything.
We have one glaze in the shop that is just for sculpture
because it's not food safe.
And it's called weathered bronze.
I wouldn't eat out of a bowl that looked like this anyway,
but that's speaking for myself.
If you love it and you want to put it
on the outside of a pot, you can.
It just should not be on the inside where food might sit.
And it's another example of how much a glaze
can change according to thickness.
Because where it's thin, it's this
uncharismatic gray-brown.
But where it's thick, it's green like oxidized copper.
So you ready for me to glaze some pots?