Choosing Ceramic Glazes

Series Summary

Ceramics, the craft of forming pottery, is over twelve thousand years old, pottery appearing in the tenth millennium before the Birth of Christ. The pottery wheel was invented between the 6th and 2nd millenniums B.C. in Mesopotamia and completely changed pottery production, allowing pottery to be created much faster and more uniform in shape. Today, in the twenty-first century, pottery is produced on a large scale; however, individual potters can mix their own clay or dig it from the ground and focus more on the art and beauty aspects of creating ceramic pottery. Glazing is one of the most important techniques an artist can employ in ceramics. Learn how to glaze pottery in this free ceramics video featuring artist C. Laura Irmis. Irmis will teach you how to choose a ceramic glaze for your pottery. Additionally, she will demonstrate how to prepare ceramic glaze for glazing pottery, how to glaze the exterior of pottery, how to glaze the interior of ceramic pieces, and how to mix glazes on the pottery.

Video Transcript

"When choosing a glaze for your final piece of ceramics there are a lot of things to consider. One of the things are how your colors are going to interact with each other. For example, if you choose a glaze for interior and exterior, how they look once they're final. So when you have a lidded piece and you open it you want to make sure these two colors go well together. So what I do in my studio, is I'll usually mark on the surface of the glazes that I like. I also try to stay organized and put them in order. But I like a lot of earth tones and blues. I do a lot of ocean inspired artwork so a lot of my colors come from nature and the oceans and the waters, and so that's how I've decided on these. I've got Midnight Sky, Desert which is just like it says a desert color. They're usually pretty true to the color. Wheat Field, it's like a light beige which is close to the other one, and the Teal Blue. So these are my favorite choices. Testers in your studio, again, are really key. So I would reference pieces that have already been glazed with these colors to help me decide as well."