I suppose my move to Australia from the USA introduced me to colour – vibrant colour, not subtle in any way,  In Australia, the flowers, trees, birds, houses, beaches, fish, and people tend to be more colourful.

This bombardment of colour seems to have produced in me a desire to create those colours in the glazes on my pottery.

 
 
 

I’ve always loved blues (OMG!!!) but I when I first saw a book on the glazes and work produced by Greg Daly, reknown Australian potter, I was gobsmacked (Australian for flabbergasted!).  I had never seen colour used so beautifully, intricately or interestingly.  It was vivid colour as well!  Not the typical “pottery” colours that so many of us are used to.  So I was motivated to learn how to do this myself.

Fortunately, the Coffs Harbour TAFE and the Coastal Claymakers were hosting a workshop by Greg Daly and I purchased a spot.  Greg’s workshop was fantastic!  He is such a generous, knowledgable, inspiring potter/teacher/man.

The first day of the workshop was centred around lustres and how to formulate, fire, and use them on pottery pieces.  His slide show was impressive, especially in that he could focus in on a small portion of the glazed piece to show an incredible interaction and how it was achieved.  The ability to look at glazes in minutia is key to the development of interesting interaction of colour in glazes.
 
 

Greg Daly showed how to mix glazes (as described in his book) so that you can test line blends and then see the results and develop new glazes.

These test tiles show a few of the colours achieved by using this line blend technique.  Although I would love to merely have a great, reliable glaze recipe for a particular colour, the process of developing the glazes is very educative and interesting.

 
These test tiles are examples of some of the colours that can be achieved through this process-pretty exciting!
 

Applying glaze to pottery is an art in itself and Greg Daly was great to show us how he layers, waxes and applies various glazes to a piece.  For example, this bowl had five glazes, waxing, dipped glaze and painted glaze.

I’d never seen anyone plan so intricately for glazing a piece.
 
 
 

I’ve only begun to dip my toe into the crazy world of colourful ceramic glazes, but I’m having a bit of luck and can’t wait to see what I can come up with!  This bowl was in the third firing of my fibre-lined gas kiln cone 10 reduction.  The base glaze is Royal Blue.  The bowl was then waxed in a criss-cross pattern with Greg Daly’s formula of mixing baby oil and turpentine with wax so that it flows better and “paints” on.  However, it is very important to wear a protective gas mask while using this type of wax.  The piece was then sprayed with Cone 6 Copper Red from the book, Oriental Glazes by Bailey.