Wow! That is awesome! I am very new to this stuff, when I first started working with clay about a year and a couple months ago, it just felt right.. almost like I had been doing it my whole life or something like that... I will definitely check out your work as I love to observe and learn as much as possible from professional potters! I was extremely surprised at how my tiles turned out being as it was my first try at them... the only bad thing is they were high fired and some warped so I am thinking about making them into somekind of wall mural or something... any ways I will stop blabbing.  By the way are you on facebook I have most of my work up on there: www.facebook.com/sullivan55amanda or my page is 

www.facebook.com/amandasullivanpottery

Good luck! I gotta get to throwing!

Electroplating directly onto ceramic painted with a conductive coating, or onto a conductive removable mandrell (electroforming) is pretty straight-forward. I've done things like this in college.

The downside is you need to use a concentrated bath of acid, like sulfuric acid, and you end up with a toxic soup of soluble metal contaminants in the acid. So it's not the sort of process we'd want to pursue in our outdoor studio.

Real estate developers using the site of a recently closed chrome plating business in West Hollywood are facing clean-up costs of $1.5 million for the soil under the building.

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2011/09/gehrydestroying_faith_plating...

A cleaner approach for a ceramic studio is PMC "gold clay", "silver clay", or "bronze clay". A moldable and toolable clay-like material which fires to a semi-precious metal. The same company sells metal etching and plating kits if you're not daunted.

http://www.metalclaysupply.com/PMC-Gold-Clay-p/52074.htm

http://www.metalclaysupply.com/Hadar-s-Clay-Smart-Bronze-50g-p/5538...

It's much like making your own ceramic gilding solution.  It's easy enough if you have the right lab equipment - a Hydrogen Sulfide cylinder inside a fume hood (as the gas is poisonous), goggles, an emergency eye wash, gloves, scale, pH paper, glassware, tubing and stoppers.

You bubble the H2S gas through lavender oil until it turns red, or simply start with Turkey Red Oil (sulfated castor oil). Then mix this sulfonated oil thoroughly with three different metal acids:

1.) a precious metal like auric acid (gold(III) chloride), or platinum chloride;

2.) Bismuth Chloride as the bonding agent between the ceramic and the precious metal;

3.) Rhodium Chloride to cover the precious metal. Thin layers of Rhodium are clear and very hard, preventing wear of the gold or platinum.

Ingredients #1 and #3 are very expensive.

Titrate off the oil portion which is your luster to apply to ceramic at ^016. The metals are attached to the oil molecules via the sulfur. Both the oil and the sulfur burn-off in the kiln leaving the thin layer of Rhodium/Gold/Bismuth on the ceramic.

But you're also left with a toxic mess in the remaining water soluble liquid to dispose of, or even more waste liquid if you used sulfuric acid instead of hydrogen sulfide to sulfonate the oil.

You can alter the finished color of the fired gold or platinum gilding by adding very small quantities of chloride of Vanadium, Chromium or Cobalt.

Not having access to the lab set-up, I just buy a 2 gram vial of Duncan Bright Gold for $35.

hey denice,

thank you very much for liking the work. i find it actually easy to post photos here on this site.. you just have to add photos from your comp and upload it.. i have never visited ceramic monthly forum.. i am finding this website pretty good to discuss work and some problems and many things.. about my raku kiln,,,, no i have not fired my new raku kiln yet i will be firing it soon.. still there is some mechanism has to be fixed for lifting the upper part.. And i will be more than happy to try out THE demuth's purple passion recipe :).. please forward it to me.... if you have any questions regarding our work please ask i will be glad to share my glaze recipes and any other things which we do.. :)

- oza

hi denice,

we dont use lead but sometime we use lead bi silicate (LBS).. and its available here in india. if i talked about our work then frankly speaking we are just beginner in this field. we are bunch of architects who want to work with their hands rather than computers. we work with gas fired kilns and cone 6 glazes right now but interested in exploring many different techniques in this medium. i will surely try this recipe but only problem with this is the frit 3110.. we get frits here but with different names so i dont know which one to replace with. if you can help in that it will be good thing for me. otherwise all other materials seems familiar. i would love to see your work because we are mostly interested in large scale work which can be a part of architecture which we do. and also if you can share some recipes of claybody for large scale work( hand building and throwing) that will be good.

whatever murals we have done till now are on ready made bisque tiles. we get the tiles and then either spray glazes on them with stencils or we paint it like a normal oil paint paintings. and fire it at a low temperature.. these are very simple glazes made from 90 LBS and 10 china clay with different  colorants and oxides. we are planning to do some handmade time murals i will keep you updated with it.. nice to take to you .

-oza

Maulik - Digitalfire is one place to find frit equivalents.

This page shows the chemical make-up of Ferro Frit 3110 and at the bottom of this page it says Ferro Frit 3110 is comparable to GF-134, Pemco P1-VO4 etc. What brand frit supplier is common in your area?

http://digitalfire.com/4sight/material/ferro_frit_3110_349.html

http://digitalfire.com/4sight/material/frits.html

There are many other frit substitution websites with and without chemical analysis, such as this one;

http://www.ceramicstoday.com/frits.htm

http://www.bigceramicstore.com/info/ceramics/frit_comparisons.html

http://www.oocities.org/peter_stephens/FerroFrits.html

http://dir.indiamart.com/impcat/ceramic-glaze-frits.html

I'm curious what lead bisilicate frit costs you for a 25 Kilo bag.  In fact I'm curious about your cost for most ceramic raw materials.  This website gives a fairly good idea what American prices are, although you can often find cheaper prices on some of these materials.

http://www.axner.com/raw-materials.aspx

http://www.axner.com/ferro-frit-3110-lead-free-sold-per-lb.aspx

Increasingly many of our US vendors purchase manufactured raw materials from China.

As an example Alisa Clausen, a potter in Denmark uses many European equivalent frits, but some of the replacements include ingredients like barium which are not in American frits, such as the UK based Johnson Matthey MOK-623 frit. To replace MOK-623 I use the following:

MOK-623 - substitute

As you can see it's almost the same, except my substitute over-supplies Calcium Oxide

In most case my glazes made with this mixture closely resembles her glazes made with MOK-623

hi norm,

i have seen this websites but thanks again for showing me the exact things. the problem is i dont know the composition of frits which i use so i cannot compare. i will ask the dealer if he can give me the composition list. i have only one pdf about it which i am attaching here just have a look.Ceramic%20Frits%20for%20Studio%20Pottery%20Technical%20Data%20Sheet...

and about pricing of the material here lead bi-silicate frit costs me 4250 indian rupee = 71 US$ for 25 kg bag. i checked some other material price also like copper carbonate costs me 4.88 us $ per pound where on that website it is costing you 11.29 $per pound... so of course there is a huge difference in price. and i think it will be for all the materials. only problem here is to get material for studio pottery. we dont have websites like axner or big ceramicstore l where we can get studio pottery related materials and equipments. specially kilns and all we will have to get it made here on our own. thats why i am using gas kilns because its  easier to build compare to electric ones..so thats the story...:) its not an easy job for ceramic artists to run the studio :)

-oza

Thank you and no, your comments definately didn't upset me.  I was asking for advice and you gave it, and the gallery that offered the advice about changing my work sold a couple of my pieces that went against the advice they gave me!  I really think the whole thing comes down to making the work that I love, while I keep working at finding the audience who will love it.  So much of it seems to be finding the person who really responds to my style.  Can't believe the gallery owner you dealt with would shoot herself in the foot and lose a sale - you're better off not dealing with someone dumb enough to do that to herself and an artist she represents.  

You're right, Denice.  MS seems to be a series of steps forward and steps back, but the suppression of the immune process seems to be getting better and more refined.  They thought I might have MS when I first had my vision loss because it so commonly affects vision first.  All of life though is one step forward and one step back.  Keep on making things.