Take glazing for example. I have all the banks I made recently, and as of yesterday all but three are now bisque fired and ready to glaze. But how to glaze them? Glazing banks is not like glazing mugs. It's not like glazing calaveras. It's a new thing.
Step one was to find a starting point.
I chose an insect-y bank because one of its appendages came off during the firing. I knocked the other one off so it was even, if imperfect. Even but imperfect is a great starting point for a glaze test.
Step two was to choose a glazing style. I want the banks to be colorful and a little out of the ordinary, glaze-wise.
I bought this chicken in a gallery in, I think, Silver City. I bought it because it was one of the ugliest things I've ever seen, so ugly that it looped back around to beautiful somehow, and it reminded me of my grandmother's chicken obsession and her early forays into ceramics. (Remind me to tell you about that sometime.)
I thought, hmm. Maybe a bank or two might look good with that kind of glaze job. But that would require a hefty initial investment on my part in low fire glazes. We generally don't use low-fire glazes at the studio, and the low-fire glazes often include lead, an ingredient absent from our mid-fire glaze range. I'm not particularly keen on working with lead, nor selling work that includes it.
I decided instead to use the range of satin glazes I have at my disposal. They're colorful but are unfortunately hard to work with. They fire out beautifully--if you can get an even layer on the piece. If you can't get an even layer on the piece, they look patchy, like a badly painted wall.
My strategy is to glob a buttload of glaze on and cross my fingers.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.
This is the test bank, with globbed on satin glazes. With any luck, it should fire out a dark grayish black with yellow tentacles and polka dots on its back and lavender eyes. We'll see.
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