Get the latest Flash player.
Summary: Waxing is very important when coloring and glazing your clay pottery. Learn some great tips on waxing from a clay expert in this free video clip.
Views: 499 | Tags: art, arts, crafts, clay, ceramics, pottery
Emily Owen Emily Owen was born and raised in Austin, Texas. She took advanced placement art courses to earn college credit while in High School, before heading to the Un... read more
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.