Clay Pottery Color & Waxing Tips

Video Transcript

"So before you start glazing your pieces, you want to gather together everything that you're going to glaze. I would normally have a whole table full here, but for purposes of demonstration, I've just got a few items. And if you have a whole bunch of items to glaze at once, it's really important to label what color you intend for your items to be. So what I do, my colors all have names. For example, if I want to do this bowl in Dawn, I'm going to write DN on the bottom of that bowl. I've written it in a graphite pencil and this will burn completely off in the glaze firing. You won't see any evidence of that when this is done. But it will help me after I wax, to separate my pots on the table into the different colors so that I can do all of one color at one time before I move on to the next color. Now the waxing is incredibly important, so you need to have a hot wax pan or you can use wax resist, which comes in a bottle. Either is fine, however, hot wax is a lot easier to use. You do want to have a window or a door open because you do need ventilation. And in order to keep this wax at a lower melting temperature, it's just regular paraffin wax, add a little bit of baby oil to it and that will lower the melting point and make it easier to spread."