For lockdown I gave myself the project of creating a new range of work, something different from my tableware range. I have been slowly making progress with it over the last few months; refining the details, playing with form, pattern, colour and surface decoration techniques. Developing a new body of work takes time as there is a lot of details to think about.
A few weeks ago, possibly longer as time has begun to blur, I made several coloured slip line blends* using commercial stains and natural oxides. They are (from top to bottom) red/orange, orange/yellow, yellow/green and green/blue. It’s very important when something new comes out of the kiln not to decide how you feel about it straight away, especially if you don’t overly like it. Usually this is because the glaze or slip has come out differently from how you hoped it would. As you can see from the photo it’s hard to tell which are the yellow and oranges slips. I was disappointed having expected them to be bright and colourful. They came out muddy with only a hint of their colour, even with a high percentage of stain. The 50-50 mix of the yellow with green works nicely and the orange with red too. I’m really happy with how the blue/green blend turned out. It is my favourite part of the colour wheel though.
With this in mind, I’ll be making up larger quantities of my chosen colours in the coming days and making more test tiles (I‘ve made a lot of tiles in the last few months) for testing these new colours with different coloured glazes over them. I have no idea how some of them will turn out, the colours they will be or the surface texture they will will have but that’s where the fun is. The possibilities are endless.
* Line blends are mixtures of two glazes or slips to specific and measurable proportions. It’s a quick and easy way for making and testing new colours and altering glazes.