Comment

Comment by Norm Stuart on April 25, 2013 at 9:27pm

Porcelain certainly is more difficult. Any stress in drying at all and you get cracks.

These are two porcelain pieces and you can see the cracking problems I had, a portrait and a pine cone.  But I also like the effects I can achieve with multiple firings with low-fire glazes after firing to cone 6 - and then there's always gilding and china paints you can add at ^016.

http://cone6pots.ning.com/photo/assembley-as-glazed

http://cone6pots.ning.com/photo/pine-cone

Both pieces have low-fire ^06 glazes over the ^6 glazes. I've found the easiest way to glaze vitrified ware is to heat it in the over to 200F or so. The glaze dries in place as you apply it. I sometimes find it helps to add some Xanthan gum powder to the glaze so the glaze hardens as it dries. I find Xanthan gum more effective than CMC gum. You can get it at a grocery store or Amazon.com.

This duck is Laguna Amador brown clay with lots of grog, which is infinitely easier to sculpt than porcelain.

But the duck also has low-fire crawl glazes over high fire glazing. In the low-firing I also used high fire glaze for feather definition covered with a gerstley borate wash. The high fire glaze remains nearly refractory in the low-fire maintaining the sharp definition of the glaze lines.

http://cone6pots.ning.com/photo/retour-du-canard

http://cone6pots.ning.com/photo/return-of-the-duck-01

It sits with a companion piece, "Return of the Duck in Orange Sauce" which is also cone 06 glaze and glass over cone 6 fired pieces. The plate is a white tin majolica flashed with chrome.

http://cone6pots.ning.com/photo/return-of-the-duck-02

Comment by robin campo on April 25, 2013 at 7:05pm

I found the porcelain much harder to use than the earthenware. the pot was fired about 6 times and so of the other pieces were fired more. Too hard to go back to lower temp. and glaze vitreous clay.

Comment by Norm Stuart on April 24, 2013 at 10:46am

The porcelain paintbrush could be art by itself.

I love seeing common objects recreated in ceramic.

One day I'll set aside some time to make a realistic looking ceramic basketball.

The ridiculousness of a fragile basketball appeals to me.