Straight Underglaze Sgrafitto carving.

This is the underglaze that I'm going to try using here on the top. I just noticed it says use on dry or bisqued clay, fire only, and ventilate. Well anyway I'm going to try it. Okay this piece has been sitting overnight. It is what I would call just soft of leather hard so I'm able to draw into it and the actual debris is almost ready to fall off but I'm starting it a bit early because if you start them too late they get too dry. But if you can see this I'm not sure I'm hoping that the camera angle is just right. I'm doing sgraffito and this is that underglaze that I got from Pottery Supply House like I don't know 10 years ago or something but I've never used it. Well I used it once on earthenware and it didn't work very well so because it is supposed to probably go to I think it says it will even go to code 10 but I'm just doing a drawing. Oh actually I've got to remember not to go too far because you won't be able to see it. I guess you could tell now it's actually a whale but see the debris isn't falling off and I like it to fall off as I carve so I can take a brush and brush it off afterwards but I got to do this because by the time I finish this it will be much drier and I don't like carving when it's really dry because you get the dust when you're breathing it in too and this is underglaze so probably not a good idea to be breathing this stuff in. So I'll put you on stop motion because this will be a very tedious part of the video if you have to watch all this but as you can see the black underglaze is quite thin whereas if I had slipped to this because I decided I wasn't going to do any slip ones until I tried this first the slip would actually have a body to it which makes it harder to carve but the underglaze is really easy to get through and I'm also trying to carve in a more vertical position because I've had a lot of neck aching and pain. I've been doing so much carving this winter leaning over I've actually carved about 40 of those 12 inch tiles and they take about four to six hours at least to carve each one so I've got to get my necks more vertical. All right stop motion coming up that's what it looks like so far. Okay so that is just about finished we'll see whether this new black underglaze does a nice black and I tested my clear glaze I got that out of the kiln this morning for cone six and it looks really nice so it should do a good job. The only problem I had with this underglaze is when I did it on the earthenware I was getting shivering at the edges of the handles and on the rim so we'll see whether that happens. I can't imagine it will because this is pottery supply house clay and it's their own underglaze. Okay one of the subscribers asked me how I get my tiles to be so flat. Isn't that interesting? I stack them with weights so when I dry them I dry them with weights all around the edges and I carve them with weights placed around the edges that I'm not carving on so there's an area where it's open and then there are other areas that weights on so it keeps the tile edges flat all the time and then when they get past leather hard they're almost dry I take the weights off but then when I bisque fire them I put the weights all back on so there's a bunch of little tiles underneath here these are just bits of broken kiln shelves over the years I've broken a lot of kiln shelves and so what I do with them is I just take a hammer to smash them up into little bits and then basically save them for when I need to keep something flat. That's obviously a little bit of extra mass in your kiln so you're firing stuff but it's flat. The next shelf down is a larger one which makes a little bit more sense I guess because now it's just around the actual perimeter edge. I won't show you the whole lot because it's full of these there's usually eight of these in one firing and so as you can see it is totally flat and when I do the glaze firing this has already been flattened so I don't need to worry about it and that is enough temperature so that this clay starts to warp it's a natural clay it's a clay that could go to cone 4 but it gets really dark chocolate brown at cone 4 and I actually didn't like it at all at cone 06 it's beautiful orange and at cone 04 it's a sort of deeper orange and at this temperature it goes that brick red you can see underneath there and so this clay starts to warp a little bit at cone 01 so I soak it for half an hour when I reach the bisque temperature of cone 01 so then when I glaze fire them at cone 04 I can even put plates on stilts and they don't warp so I can glaze the bottom of plates and the tiles do not warp up again when they go to cone 04 so it's actually that's why I bisque at 01 and I glaze at I wasn't going to record this video on the kiln unloading because you know we see a lot of mugs but I started and then I noticed oh that's right I did a bunch of experimenting that would be worth letting you know what happened so so I really kind of tried to keep doing the same type of things that I usually do which is a base color with variegated blue and oatmeal over the top this time I decided to make this I had six of each mug like mouse gray here and then I would do the variegated blue but then I thought well I'll put some matte turquoise over the top and then and then oatmeal and then I'll try the apple green and do the oatmeal over the top so basically you know mouse gray apple green then the oatmeal and and then mouse gray matte turquoise and then oatmeal and then one of the normal ones which is mouse gray variegated blue and oatmeal this one is using the let me think apple matte turquoise this one is matte turquoise which looks really good let me get one of the I balanced everything on the edge of the kiln which I know means stress let's get one this is how it normally looks and that's what it looked like with the matte turquoise so we got mouse gray variegated blue oatmeal mouse gray matte turquoise and oatmeal and both are really nice so I should start varying that quite a bit let's see if I can find a different one oh here's the apple green version okay this one is apple green and there's the usual way it looks and I think the apple green has great potential too so um so we got some nice sort of you know break and shake it up a little bit so that's the mouse gray um the tenmiku gold with variegated blue and oatmeal sometimes comes out so blue and other times so funny in this batch it came out really blue and it ran almost to the bottom and I just had to grind it off a little bit because that one was just a bit overlapping so I just grind off a bit basically this one didn't run to the bottom but it's the same glazes I'm making sure I don't dip the handle too much because even though I barely touch this area when I was dipping on I dip at an angle like that instead of like that and so you barely get any on the handle look how far it runs down the handle even then so that's why we always get a handle drip if I'm not fully alert when I'm glazing um here's the same one with matte turquoise so instead of variegated blue I use matte turquoise here I use variegated blue here I use matte turquoise once again it's a really good alternative and you got quite a bit of yellow coming through in there too so I'm going to try this one a lot more too we have an apple green version of that I have to look because I didn't take that one out yet here's the apple green one less and it still ran quite a bit so I've got a little tiny one little bit of a glaze drip uh but the apple green one uh less interesting still okay but but that one I wouldn't be excited about but um I'm surprised I thought apple green would do well what else do we have here another variegated blue with the runs so that's one reason not to do the variegated blue but that one just a little grinding there it'll be fine look grinding is time here's another one variegated blue ran right to the edge but where it didn't dip the handle and just get a little bit down so I can control it but still that is touch and go so got lucky on that one but I've got a couple of grinding issues there um here's one using the slop green glaze with matte turquoise and oatmeal over the top that's got some potential that's kind of nice the runs are pretty intense though but didn't go over the bottom uh let's see hard to see which ones have there's another mouse gray this was matte turquoise over it that's a pretty stable one to do the mouse gray is turning out great however this one spectacular I should have recorded doing that I did some slip trailing glazes in these areas that seem to be running a lot more using my brown which would be my waxing brown or I could have been telling me I think it's waxing brown from mastering code six glazes but basically it's over the slop green glaze with apple green and oatmeal and then some slip trailing using oatmeal and brown to get some extra runs in there but that's pretty amazing so I wasn't even going to do these this one I just described this is the bright blue what do we have there that's another one that's the mouse gray with the apple green so that's another one we can do again this one was my regular bright blue and I think it had the apple green over the top two because there's a little greeny tint there this one seems to be greenish at the top too so I'm betting that's the apple green as well and then there's the variegated blue oatmeal over the bright blue and because I did those extra little slip trailing things we get a lot of extra runs in the bowl and on the outside pretty nice bowl so I wasn't going to go into these at all that one this is left over from another fire people have been asking me I took an order yesterday for six flat bowls and so I've been making quite a few of those flat bowls that one I think we've seen this one's a variation on the nighttime Icelandic series that I kind of do and instead of leaving it black all the way to the rim I actually dip variegated blue and oatmeal again at the rim just a little bit but I think it works out really nice when I do that okay what do we have in this one this was one where I experimented with the bowl and once again that's turned out really pretty this was mouse gray yep mouse gray on quite thinly look at the chattering showing up there really nice and then I did variegated blue and oatmeal over the top and then I slipped no no that's wrong I did variegated blue and apple green over the top in the upper part so mouse gray everywhere and then I just dipped like this this with one and then this this with the other glaze so we got mouse gray variegated blue apple green and then a little bit of oatmeal right on the rim and then I did some slip trailing in these areas here and here so it gave me some extra runs and the one that really shows up is just here I was slip trading some little square kind of rectangle things very loosely twice with the actual brown glaze which has pretty much disappeared and the oatmeal which is lightened the green a little bit but that's very pretty I was worried about these because I was glazing quite thickly anything different down here no that level is pretty much what you've seen and once again variegated blue doing its nice running thing over the slop green so it's the variegated blue that is the problem however I just mixed up a new batch of variegated blue with less fritted it and that one I think is working better but this is using up my old variegated blue though I don't have much left but I thought I would just use it but I think I'm now going to mix that bit that's left in with the new one because I think the running will be less