Section: Glazes, Subsection: General

Description

If you are the only technically oriented person in your company, school or pottery club you will get a charge out of this report from a right-brained potter always fighting to drag others into understanding glazes.

Article

Recently I got this email from a pottery club. It really makes me think about left-brained and right-brained approaches to ceramics and how we might work together a bit better than we sometimes do.

"Several of our glazes are showing evidence of failure and I wanted to work on "fixing" some of these problems. This has lead me down an interesting and very absorbing line of research that started with digging out and dusting off my old chemistry text books. Unfortunately, the other members were not very supportive of storing the one or two small containers of glaze, loading and running the test tiles through the kiln (yes I know seems incredulous). I was working on only one glaze at a time, made a very small batch as a base from which to start.

After explaining the process, I was told basically that they just weren't willing to deal with it. Yes these are still the people who complain about crazing! I know that adding silica to the recipe works for many glazes, but without the testing process I am not at all sure how much to use or if other properties are compromised. So they succeeded in dampening my enthusiasm - well not really - just putting off the final part of the research until such time as my own studio is built and I can just do it myself! They know I have glaze calculation software and they know I have a very extensive library - I'm the "techie" in the group that everyone always asks the "why does this work this way" questions of!"

It is understandable that most potters and sculptors are right-brained, creative and intuitive. However if you are fortunate to have a left-brained analyser in your club or as a friend it only makes sense to support them (even if they are eccentric enough to be interested in ceramic chemisty and material science!). These people are going to help you make glazes that don't shiver or craze, ones that don't dissolve in acidic or hot liquids, ones that don't cutlery mark or stain. If they are really good they will be able to do these things without compromising much of the appearance or texture of the glaze and they will be able to improve application properties of your glaze slurries so that they are a joy to use. They might even be able to combine a bunch of your glazes to use a common base, then you can get rid of all those bags of materials that are only used in one recipe. I am definitely left-brained and my intiution tells me these are going to be big issues in future and potters will face increasing scrutiny for the quality of the ware they sell.

Right-brained people are usually pretty quick to offer assistance with things like how to throw, how to design, how to glaze. But are they ready to listen also, to understand how glazes work, to make changes in the way things are done? Everyone in the club will benefit and so will the people that end up using the pottery.

The future of ceramic recipe, material and physical testing record keeping is here.

Watch the video or sign-up at http://insight-live.com.

Maintain your recipe database on-line

Login to a private account or work with others in a group account (e.g. university).
Nothing to install (access it using your web browser). It is always the latest version.
Easy to import your existing data.
As many side-by-side recipes as you want.
Many ways to search and classify glaze and body recipes.
Glaze and body recipes are robust, with units-of-measure, unlimited pictures with individual titles and descriptions.
Add variations to a recipe; each with its own pictures, descriptions and name/code-number extensions.
Recipes can link to typecodes, projects and firing schedules (all managed in their own areas).
Standard reports and mix ticket reports with last-minute-totalling; variations report as if they are a complete recipe.
Video tutorials, help system, contact form on every page, dedicated messaging and support ticket systems.
It is an industrial-strength database system (unlimited capacity, fast, reliable, scalable).

Imports many file formats

Glaze recipe formats supported: HyperGlaze, GlazeGhem, GlazeMaster, Matrix, INSIGHT XML recipes (single and multiple), INSIGHT SQLite DB files.
Assign a batch number to imports, and later search by batch.
Assign multiple typecodes to imported glaze and body batches (to classify) and search on these later.
Prepend character sequences to glaze recipe names during import.
Import the pictures and pair them to their corresponding records automatically.
One click to automatically export the database to an SQLite DB database file and download it (for use with desktop INSIGHT or just as a backup).
Export and import individual glaze recipes as text or XML.

Perfect for Education

Ceramic study programs can now accumulate material, recipe and testing data year-after-year, students can login and together build a valuable ceramic glaze and body knowledge resource.
Students already have internet connected devices, computers are not even needed in the class.
The Reference Manager gives you quick access to the Digitalfire Ceramic Reference Database.

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