#glaze testing

[muddypyro]

this recipe is third generation, and after several attempts to 'breed' a dark crystalline glaze, I stumbled on this;

this would be a good example of cobalt and nickel competing for crystal coloration. it's a greener hue in person, but with so much refraction going on, photographing it has been difficult. another stable glaze, in terms of crazing and keeping up with the porcelain.

when soaked in acid to leach excess oxides;

quite different!

trying to think of a good name for this result...

and still trying to get a fully deep/dark crystalline glaze. already have some ideas from this result though, testing that out next firing!

[buf309]

Can you honestly tell me that this scenario has never haunted your mind at all? 😈

🎃 Happy Halloween 🎃

[jbbartram-illu]

Hello! That blue woodsman from you last shop update is gorgeous! How did you get such a rich blue?

So this is a mildly fraught question because that Woodsman is made from a black clay (aka a clay body heavily pigmented with iron oxide), which can react SUPER weirdly to glazes. What I'm saying is that it's been an Adventure figuring out what glazes to use on this clay & I've definitely had some disappointing results...

...but THIS GUY?? Not one of them!

The glaze I used is called Blue Cornflower by Coyote from their Enduro-Colour line & it totally sings on the black clay. Here's another sculpture I used it on (a very fun commission for a Manta Ray rolling tray, a.k.a. the Manta Tray):

Dreamy, eh?!

I'm also super jazzed because a bunch of my new Spectrum glazes look rad on the black clay -- here are a few of my favs:

And finally (how do these get so long? It's certainly not my fault!), one of my fav unexpected successes is putting Amaco's Potter's Choice Seaweed on black clay. What's usually a lovely deep, sargasso-sea green becomes...agèd-looking, slightly shiny bronze?! Because pottery is magic & also alchemy?!*

*I know it's actually chemistry, but I don't understand chemistry beyond a very basic level so to me? ALCHEMY!

[bunchofdoodlesinspace]

1st set of Winx redesigns for my version of the show, ft. Bloom! :D Here we have her Winx, Charmix, and Enchantix forms.

Transformation lore + redesign notes will be under the cut!

Winx: As described in my big hc post, this is the base form, the one everyone starts with. Once you really tap into your magic and gain the ability to transform, this is the form you start out with. I actually added detail to Bloom's form, while maintaining the basic shape of the canon design. I also switched up her wing design to sort of mimic the shape of dragon wings (this was a pain bc they kept looking too...fishy, for a while, but I think I figured it out). Also, I'm calling this form Winx because a) it sounds better than base form and b) I like the lore concept from the 4kids dub that Winx is like. your magic potential or w/e. So I'm using that.

Charmix: The power-up for Winx! I wanted to make this one feel more like...y'know, a power-up, lmao. I was actually considering making it an entire new form, but then I remembered when I was first trying to redesign the base forms (yes I've been here multiple times), I added these glowing neon lines and decided. Yknow what, that looks cool, that's what Charmix is gonna look like now. So here it is! The lines themselves are meant to glow with the colour of the fairy's magic (hence why Bloom's are orange), and using it also causes their eyes to glow, until they revert back to using Winx.

Enchantix: Listen I love the flowy dresses and long gloves and everything, I do, but I think a more armoured version of Enchantix would look so cool. Really emphasizes the whole concept of "guardian fairies" imo. Obviously I still wanted to keep elements of the original, so similar to Winx, I took the basic shapes of Bloom's dress (because it's so pretty and I love it) and played around with that. I also give all of them these long glove-things and toe-less socks to call back to the fancy gloves and sandals. Added a crown with some dragon-adjacent horns and used more fire-inspired shapes for the wings to emphasize the whole "Dragon Flame" and "Princess of Domino" aspects of Bloom's character, since I feel they are. very important. for this one.

Also, you might be looking at this and going "Cupcake. Where are fairy dust bottles." and to that I say. There uh. There isn't. I took those out BUT fairy dust is not gone, I'm not removing something THAT central to the plot. No, instead, each Enchantix fairy gets a wand that they can summon when they wish to perform spells using the fairy dust. And the reason the wand isn't in this post? ...I haven't designed any of them yet sjkdhfkg But I'll make a post in the future with all of them at some point when I do :)

[zazrichor]

I'm currently playing through the Pathfinder series and I have to say, I am obsessed. Aster is my Kingmaker OC, Phesolis is my Kingmaker General/Baroness of Varnhold, and Zinnia is my WotR OC. Zinnia and Aster are chaotic siblings.

[kurjakani]

Grampa w glasses looking SO fine and also some cybermen, finally got to those eps!! Which also means good bye to gampa :( And helloooo to cute new doctor, kinda exited :0c

[rendoas]

[koeal]

Sun!Dream is a shared with @starryelem

[viric-dreams]

Is anyone here Glazing/Nightshading their images? Downloaded them and am testing the process now and it seems like such a ballache... Kind of sucks putting the onus on the artists to do work to ensure your work isn't scraped.

[dransnake]

To celebrate the reveal of Dedf1sh, I decided to make a little clay slab with her. Will update after the bisque fire

[muddypyro]

now some good shit:

a new copper and iron glaze i developed!

probably redid this recipe 5x to fine tune the chemistry according to all the research available before trying this. quite happy. here's how it keeps the porcelain translucency

oof. so nice. stable af too.

[claypigeonpottery]

[jbbartram-illu]

Hi! I love all of your work, but I am absolutely entranced by the glaze test bowls! Are you planning on adding those to your shop?

Oh! I didn't think people would want them (they're a bit rough & wobbly as I gave myself max 10mins to make each one), but I can definitely consider sticking some in my next update.

I am, however, going to keep some for reference for future projects, so I won't be able to sell all of them (at least not right away, as some of these glazes are brand new to me & it'll be good to have little samplers hanging around while I plan future rounds of glazing!).

Also, since you gave me an excuse, here are a few more shots of the test bowls, feat. one with an absolutely gorgeous finger-on-phone-screen-scrawled glaze/clay-type label from a batch of annotated photos I sent to a pottery pal :)

[honeybeeffdrawshere]

bold & brass

[darewolfcreates]

More end poem mugs :]

[impistry]

So I was curious regarding the desktop version of GLAZE after sharing this post, which I did some science and tested it on my PC. Turns out my GPU does NOT really have the power to run this program for each individual image (it took almost 30 min to render a 521kb file at almost the lowest settings, my GPU can not handle a preview, & it gave me an error message in the end because the settings were apparently too low), and I do not have the funds for a new graphics card to run this program. I also do not I think my GPU could handle Nightshade (it's far more GPU usage heavy than GLAZE). Before someone suggests using the web version of GLAZE, I signed up originally when it was first rolled out, and found that a lack of a preview does not allow for you to dial in settings before running it, and it can take a while to email the image to yourself, so it would be a LOT of back and forth with testing settings to find something that works for each individual image.

Below is the comparison of the Glazed vs Unglazed Art that the Desktop version spat out (even with an error):

End result is I do not think this works for comics (at least not monochrome) because the GLAZED version looks rather dirty in comparison. This might be due to the low settings, or it just might get worse the higher you set them (i.e. more noise added to the image), but my GPU really struggled with just the bare bones settings and going higher only increases the time it needs to run.