Are drippy glazes what pottery has come to?

There is an undeniable appeal to the bright colors of many commercial glazes. While nobody is recommending abandoning them and going all-in on DIY, there is an appeal to having more control. If you are a potter, hobbyist or small manufacturer, consider: Do we want customers eating and drinking from these kinds of glazes? This type of ware is often crazed (runny glazes do that, especially on bodies they were not designed to fit). These are also prime candidates for leaching the high percentages of the heavy metals they contain. All those drippy layers running and pooling on the insides can make pieces into glaze compression time bombs. For food surfaces, the glaze manufacturers want us using their recommended balanced, lightly colored products. Good news! These base recipes are also the easiest to make yourself. When did we get intimidated about mixing our own glazes anyway? No one has to go full mad scientist on DIY here. Research the common ingredients your supplier offers. Use recipes that pass a sanity test. Be a savvy consumer - these colored products are expensive and using them only on the outsides will cut your costs in half. Learn to add pigments to your base recipes and save even more. Then learn to make and use dipping glazes (not dripping glazes) and save time also.

AI-generated using prompt for drippy and layer glazed pottery typically displayed on social.

Related Pictures

The color? Good. The liner glaze? Safer. The crazing? Weakens the piece.

AI generated with a prompt for a mug with layered glazes, crazing and representative of what is on social.

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.

Color like this, from commercial brushing glazes, has become so trendy that multiple problems associated with it are being ignored by potters and hobbyists at cone 6. First, crazing (this network of fine cracks): When people use dense-burning bodies, ware doesn't leak, so it is deemed to be OK. When ware is made using stoneware clays having higher porosities, and it leaks, the clay bodies are blamed. And the poor strength resulting from the crazing is also blamed on the clay. However, this potter has done two right things:
1. Using an iron-stained honey glaze on the inside (e.g. GA6-B). It does not, cannot, leach heavy metals. Many are misinterpreting the ASTM D-4236 label on glaze jars and using intense heavy metal colored glazes on food surfaces!
2. The honey glaze inside does not craze so the mug does not leak even though the body has a higher porosity than the supposed vitrification magic number of <0.5%.
The bottom line: Use glazes that don't craze, DIY ones if possible or necessary, don't use really bright colors on food surfaces.

I waited for a week for someone to notice this was AI-generated. I used an AI image because a real piece would offend the maker. AI produced this on first try as representative of what's on social. AI photos are less authentic than DIY, so are pieces made in isolation of awareness of the critical design and safety flaws outlined here. This page gives part of the solution and links to full solutions.

“Retail Rick” Has it Figured Out

He’s got a much better way to glaze

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.

Rick doesn’t dig clay, crush rocks, or make glazes. Ew, messy. He buys commercial glazes in cute little jars, each the price of a steak dinner. Sure, back in the dark ages, potters used actual dirt and rocks. And, around here you can even get a ton of gravel or clay, for $20. But today, potters shell out twice that for one box and say, “Totally worth it!” OK, fine. But glaze is where it gets magical. A ton of local gravel is packed with feldspar, silica, calcium carbonate, dolomite — a whole cone-10 party (that can be moved to a cone 6 neighborhood with a little frit). Grind it, add clay, dip, done. How is it possible that an overloaded pickup truck full costs half the price of a single 500ml jar Rick uses? Something’s upside down here! Rick says: “Why mess with base recipes or spend all that effort learning and testing DIY dipping glazes when I can spend minutes multi-layering these commercial paints”! Of course, he has to brush up the price to pay for them! And sure, some customers might question how glazes that have such intense metallic colors and run like mascara in the rain are not silica-starved metal-oxide sludge. Rick answers: “They have safety labels, with fancy symbols, so I don’t have to think about that”. The icing on the cake it how well they photograph and how good they look on Rick’s social. He really has this thing figured out. Tradition is overrated anyway, right?

Videos

Links

URLs	https://digitalfire.com/podcasts/upload/podcast.mp3 Digitalfire Podcast Nov 2024: Commercial vs DIY glazes It is time to consider a hybrid approach to glazing. DIY glazes and dipping glazes where appropriate will save money, reduce the risk of leaching, match your clay body better.
Articles	Where do I start in understanding glazes? Break your addiction to online recipes that don't work or bottled expensive glazes that you could DIY. Learn why glazes fire as they do. Why each material is used. How to create perfect dipping and brushing properties. Even some chemistry.
Glossary	Commercial hobby brushing glazes These are an incredible benefit to pottery beginners and pure hobbyists. But they can also be an obstacle to progress and affordability as your skills improve.

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