Creating Coloured Porcelain

I have been experimenting with adding colour into porcelain slip. I've decided to colour the clay body, rather than adding a glaze or coloured slip on the surface, as I have been creating 3D textured pieces which I feel would lose their definition if I covered them. To get bright colours, quite a lot of underglaze needed to be added to the porcelain, because the porcelain is white, so all of the resulting colours would be tints.

I decided to test the colours at different temperatures as well as different concentrations of colour. Starting at 1g of underglaze to 100ml of porcelain slip, I also tested 2g, 3g and 5g. I poured out the slip onto plaster bats to dry, then cut each into 6 sections to fire at 1000, 1060, 1140, 1200, 1230, and 1260 degrees Celcius. I felt like this would give me a good overview of how the firing temperature and concentration alter the colour.

I used Picasso blue, black, turquoise, and lime green underglaze powders, and I plan to start mixing my own colours now I have a better idea of how they behave at different temperatures and concentrations. I remembered to label them before I fired them because I've made the mistake before of getting a beautiful result and forgetting how I got there!

I will make some texture tests with the coloured clay to see how the surface works with the colour, and I will also try putting underglaze powders into plastic clay rather than slip, to see if a uniform texture can be obtained by wedging it into the clay.

Ceramics: Glazing the patterned pieces

 This is the cabbage textured piece, with stripes of lilac under glaze with transparent glaze on top. Because the piece is so small, I was worried I had put the transparent shiny glaze on too thick, and if it is too thick, it can come out cloudy or opaque, which would obscure the stripes, and possibly the texture of the clay piece.

 For my bigger woven piece, I used ceramic pencil crayons to draw a pattern on some of the clay strips, the pattern taken from knitted stocking stitch. I then used royal blue under glaze and transparent glaze on top for the other strips, so it will hopefully look like shiny threads and knitted threads have been woven together

 For these very small ones, I didn't want to colour them particularly, but I wanted to use something to bring out the texture, so I used black copper oxide, then used a sponge to wipe the surface so the black was only in the indented parts.

 I did the same with this one, using a brown stain, wiped off the surface, to highlight the gaps between the mosaic tiles.

 This was my smaller woven piece, I have used royal blue under glaze and green stain for the different threads, then transparent glaze on top.

 I wanted to highlight the textile pattern on this piece, and I thought the detail could have been too easily obscured if I put a transparent glaze on it so I left it as a stain, wiped off the surface to create a contrast between the colours and the white clay.

 This was more compicated to glaze, and I had to buy a very small paintbrush to create the detail. I started with a white tin glaze, then painted on the green stain pieces. I couldn't find a glaze which was the right kind of orange, so decided to use a darker one, which will come out a darker colour than it is now.

I used the same colour for the middle of this piece, and painted the edges with the royal blue under glaze. I wanted these pieces to be quite vibrant, to possibly use these (or pieces made by a similar method) in jewellery.