Commercial Cone 6 Glazes: July Pier Palette Inspiration

Welcome to the Third Friday Commercial Cone 6 Glaze Post.

For a bit, I'm going to be putting out color palettes of Cone 6 glazes that relate to the monthly Color Inspiration blog post created by Brandi Hussey of BrandyGirlBlog for our Beads of Clay group.

Next week, on Thursday (July 26, 2012) you can see a bunch of our Beads of Clay Professional Artist Team member items that also show off their interpretation of this monthly color palette.

Brandi Hussey's Pier Palette Color Palette.
This palette is our July 2012 Beads of Clay Color Inspiration Theme.

Although making your own glaze allows you to be a bit more in control of your glazes once you have mastered your recipe and understand how to change colors based on it (or other recipes you may have in your notebook), I prefer to start with commercially available glazes.

For my studio situation, what I create, and how I like to work - commercial glazes are ideal.

And besides - they have artists and chemists that do the base work, and test things out, then label them according to safety, handling, and firing instructions.

I like to mix, apply, and test by mixing and layering to see how I can get more from what comes out of that jar...

That is why I love to glaze.

I do not enjoy the actual measuring, and mixing of dry materials and figuring out the chemistry side of things (besides the cost and upkeep of all that dry material - just not my thing).

So from all the glaze testing I've been doing in the last few years, I grabbed some of my test tiles to come up with a palette of glazes that I have on hand, that I feel captures the overall feel of Brandi's Pier Palette Color Inspiration.

Marsha's color palette for BOC July 2012.

The Commercial Cone 6 glazes I used above are from Left to Right:

Georgies: PG607 (Nassau Blue)

Marsha's Test Mix: Coyote 74 +67 (Alabaster Satin + Light Blue Shino)

Marsha's Test Mix: Georgies PG624 + GLW08 (Ripe Apple Red + Copper Patina)

Coyote 25 (Yellow Orange)

Coyote 33 (Turquoise)

Marsha's Test Mix: Georgies PG641 + PG635 (White Cloud + Black Patent)

Going for matchy-matchy can be pretty hard to do with glazes.

But it is always interesting to see what you come up with.

Especially once you start mixing glazes to come up with cool new colors (I usually start with a 1:1 ration of the wet glaze out of the jar and go from there).

Every firing can be different due to a number of things:

Application of glazes.

Interaction of glaze with your clay body.

The way the glaze moves over your texture (or lack of texture).

The size of your kiln, the way your kiln fires, the atmosphere in your kiln, the barometric pressure outside, and so much more.

So after looking at Brandi's photo and going into the studio to pull out some test tiles to then go and glaze up some pieces so I can submit some for our BOCPAT follow up post next Thursday, I also decided that there were a few other colors I could pull from her image that I was drawn to in glazes that I really like to work with.

The first two rows are the same glazes in the photo above.

The third row shows:

Marsha's Mixture: Blue Brown Glaze (Coyote 42 + Coyote 43)

Clear glaze on porcelain to create "white".

And Georgies GLW47 (Kalamata Black).

I'm curious to see how I can work these colors into pieces that can be used as components for someone's finished jewelry project.

A similar summery beach palette was selected for the Beads of Clay Summer Design Challenge.

Make sure to check back here on July 26 to see what our BOCPAT members have to show off for this palette inspiration for your next project!