Glossy blacks are best made adding a black stain to a quality base transparent

Monday 24th November 2014

The glaze on the left is called insight-live.com/glossary/87">Tenmoku Cone 6 (a popular, and old, CM recipe). It is 20% calcium carbonate, 35% Custer feldspar, 15% OM4 Ball Clay and 30% silica, 10% iron oxide. If you have any experience with glaze you will note two things that a fishy here: There is no boron, lithia or zinc sourcing material. How can this melt enough at cone 6? It looks melted, but the ease of scratching it shows it is not. So, it appears that if we saturate an incompletely melted glaze with a lot of refractory brown colorant on a dark body the effect can be black. A better idea is the glaze on the right. We start with a stable, reliable base transparent, G2926B. Then we add 5% Mason 6666 black stain (stains are smelted at high temperatures, quenched and ground, they are inert and relatively safe). A bonus is we end up with a slurry that is not nearly as messy to use and does not turn into a bucket of jelly.

Pages that reference this post in the Digitalfire Reference Library:

Can a cone 6 functional glaze having only whiting and feldspar melt enough?, Glaze Durability, Melting Temperature, Mechanism

This post is one of thousands found in the Digitalfire Reference Database. Most are part of a timeline maintained by Tony Hansen. You can search that timeline on the home page of digitalfire.com.