Reddit mentions: The best ceramic art books

The staple around our studio was the potters dictionary of materials and techniques. https://www.amazon.com/Potters-Dictionary-Materials-Techniques-Fifth/dp/0812238109



Some good recipes for clays and glazes by temperature:
http://www.alfredgrindingroom.com/recipes/


If you want a clay body that fires pure white and has good hand building properties you will probably have to mix your own. Honestly, just google clay recipes, there is no shortage of resources out there these days. For a good hand building body, make sure your recipe has some sort of grog or fiber in it like mulched paper or even straw and the like. This is going to help give strength as the clay body itself will most likely be super soft because you want a pure white color.


I find pre-mixed clays usually fire more of a buff /off white color, as pure white clays tend to not be great for hand building. It is the nature of kaolinite (the main ingredient of porcelain and the reason your clay is white) to be difficult. To sum up very vaguely and over-simplified, kaolinite cleaves too perfectly and is too uniform to be a great hand buildding clay body. It's why it's wonderful for throwing, very soft and maleable.


Look into glaze calculation resources. It will help you understand the nature of each ingredient. You have some ingredients that act as a flux (e.g. frit makes things more runny, calcium makes it less runny), some for color, some for strength, etc. Once you understand the broader principles you can make a better clay mixture to suit your needs.

What cone do you want to fire to? What texture do you want for your glaze surface? Are you looking for matte, satin, gloss? Do you have specific colors in mind?

Find out what cone your school generally fires to and in what atmosphere (oxidation or reduction), and formulate your glazes for that. Your school may have special firing options like Raku or salt/soda firings which you may want to look into as well. Once you know what you want it's much easier to find recipes online.

If your school has a well stocked chem room, they have someone who can point you in the right direction for glazes. Ask the firing tech/professor for guidance. John Britt's The Complete Guide to High-Fire Glazes is a good start, but books are only going to take you so far. You usually have to tweak glazes quite a bit before you get the results you want. You'll want to look into line blends and triaxial blends for testing your glazes.

At its core you need 3 components for a glaze: the glass-former, the stabilizer and the flux. You also have colorants and opacifiers. The 5 basic components for a glaze are:

The Glass-former: Silica,SiO2 (and rarely Boron)

The Stabilizer: Alumina Al2O3 (and sometimes other refractory materials like titianium dioxide, and rarely Boron, which is a special snow-flake). This prevents the glaze from flowing and generally slows the melt.

The Flux: Lithium Carbonate, Sodium Carbonate, Potassium Carbonate, Magnesium Carbonate, Calcium Carbonate, Barium Carbonate, etc. also some metals like iron and the bizarre glass-former cum stabilizer cum flux, Boron. These materials make the glaze melt. Each flux has different properties which makes it valuable. They can change the texture, viscocity, surface tension and color of the glaze with small additions. With Lithium and Copper you can achieve an almost electric blue, while you'll likely get a more sedate green with Sodium and Copper. With a significant amount of Magnesium you can cause the glaze to bead up on the surface of the pot.

The Colorant: Cobalt Carb (Generally Blue), Copper Carb (Green, Blue, Red, rarely Yellow), Iron Oxide (Brown, Green, Blue, Yellow, "Red"), Chrome Oxide (Green, Red), Nickel Carbonate (Gray, Brown, variable), Manganese Dioxide (Amber), Cerium Oxide (Amber also opacifying flux), Praseodymium Oxide (Chartreuse), Erbium Oxide (Pink), Holmium Oxide (Pink-Yellow, depending on light), Neodymium Oxide (Pink-Purple-Blue depending on light) etc. Colorants are generally added in small amounts 1-5% of total. Chrome and Cobalt are very strong and generally don't need to exceed 1%.

Opacifiers: Things that make the glaze go from translucent to opaque include, Tin Oxide (powerful 3-5%, generic white), Zirconium/Zircopax (5-10%, refridgerator white), Titanium Dioxide (5-10%, creamy, mottled white), Alumina (Creamy white similar to Titanium).

Many of these materials can be found together in the form of feldspars. Feldspars will often be the base of a glaze and are then modulated with other compounds. Many feldspars are complete glazes in and of themselves, each firing to its own cone.

There are also man made composites known as frits. These are generally formulated to melt at a lower temperature than feldspars and are often the basis of lowfire glazes. Frits are great because they can incorporate otherwise soluble materials (Sodium) in an insoluble format, preventing loss to evaporation etc.

Glazes are weird beasts, but they're also a lot of fun once you start making some progress with them. Good luck in your future experiments!

1. Have an electrician examine the outlets to make sure the circuit can handle the amps the kiln will draw. If an outlet matches the plug, that does not mean the circuit will not start a fire if it is not rated for the amount of electricity the kiln will use.
   
   
2. Get John Britt's mid-fire book so you can learn about glaze materials and safety:
   http://smile.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Mid-Range-Glazes-Ceramics/dp/1454707771/
   
   
3. Ceramics Arts Daily has an email newsletter, plus a lot of great info for free and for sale. The forums are pretty active as well so you can speak to other educators and studios to ask for advice.
   http://ceramicartsdaily.org/
   
   

You have a good eye for geometric patterns and should look into making ceramic tiles. Couple hundred for a used kiln (make sure the voltage is correct for your house), a hundred or so in clay, plaster, tools and glaze materials and you could churn out lots of tiles pretty cheaply. Going to cover my entire house in handmade tiles someday,they're really fun to make! Try Frank Giorgini's book if it sounds like something you'd be interested in. The world could always use more tile makers!

Clay and Glazes For the Potter is the best resource for glaze formulation. An older edition can be picked up pretty cheaply. I think I paid $15 for my copy. http://www.amazon.ca/Clay-Glazes-Potter-Daniel-Rhodes/dp/0873418638

The ceramic spectrum is also pretty good as well http://www.amazon.ca/Ceramic-Spectrum-Simplified-Approach-Development/dp/0873418212

Yay! I'm glad you liked the card! Yes, the card was a part of a set of teacup illustration cards by Molly Hatch. You can see some here :)

John Britt's book is the best resource I've found for these types of questions.... and will help answer all of the next questions you are soon to have now that you're dealing with glaze chemistry. Good luck.

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-High-Fire-Glazes-Ceramics/dp/1600592163

My suggestion, pick up one of the books by John Britt based on how you fire:

Mid-Range Glazes : https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Mid-Range-Glazes-Ceramics/dp/1454707771

High-Fire Glazes: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-High-Fire-Glazes-Ceramics/dp/1600592163

These books are GREAT beginners bibles. He describes all of the equipment you need, what all of the various glaze components actually do, how to do various tests, and a HUGE collection of great glazes with photos.

I'm pretty good at reading articles and putting things together, but his books really opened my eyes, and for the low cost of the books, I think anyone who wants to learn about glazes is foolish to not buy them.

When I do tests, I do 100g batches. I make my test tiles on the wheel, about 3 inches high. Then, I'll apply it to my tile in various thicknesses. Lastly, I'll do a bunch of other tests where I see what it is like when it's layered with other glazes that I have. So one new glaze usually results in about 12 test tiles. I try to do at least one set of tiles every time I do a glaze firing.

I also stamp a serial number into each tile and keep notes in a log book - this is very important! Then, I put all the "ugly" ones into a box for future review, in case my aesthetics change. All of the nice ones, I hang from a small rack on my wall.

That's not how crackle glazes are usually created--crazing develops slowly over hours or days after the pieces come out of the kiln. You don't need to pull the pots out too hot... they are more likely to shatter than crackle, unless you're using a raku body. If you take pieces out when the kiln is 100-200 C, you will already hear lots of 'pinging' as microcracks form in the glaze surface. You can also put a warm-hot piece in water to cool it faster and increase crazing. Try this with existing pieces you have. Boil them in a pot of water then cool them rapidly in cool water. Wear eye protection in case they shatter. Also, to accentuate the cracks, you can soak pieces in some diluted India ink and then wipe off the excess. All this crazing will of course weaken your pieces.

Whether you need a special recipe depends (many 'stable' glazes do craze with time, use, and heating/cooling), but a crackle recipe will be better. You could try for example:
Kuan 1 (a white crackle glaze from John Britt's new mid-range book--Buy it! it's excellent) Neph sye 85, Wollastonite 4, Gerstley Borate 10, Zircopax 10, Bentonite 2 (optional)

I'm going to assume that you're firing cone 6 electric. If you are, then get yourself a copy of this book. If you're firing to cone ten, then this one.

John Britt's books are great. Everything you need to know about basic to intermediate glaze chemistry are in those two books, along with a metric shit ton of recipes... most of which he tested himself.
He has a pretty extensive YouTube channel that's worth checking out too.

Initial stocking of a pantry is a little costly, but not too awful. My wife mixes glazes with off-the-rack ingredients and stocking out the basics cost around $200. That gave her 50 pound bages of the important stuff like a couple feldspars, silica, kaolin, etc and then a few pounds of a handful of colorants and more specialized ingredients like copper and strontium. There's enough material to easily keep her in glaze for a few years without restocking. Compared to jarred glazes, mixing your own pays for itself in a hurry.

If you start mixing buckets of glaze, the first thing you need to buy is a respirator. Silicosis is bad and there's an awful lot of it to be had in a dusty glaze room. You're fine once it's in a slurry.

The Britt book is pretty solid if you are doing cone 10.

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-High-Fire-Glazes-Ceramics/dp/1600592163

Try https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Pottery-Workshop-Ceramic-Handbooks/dp/0713679387. It’s a bit dated but the basics are there. You have a lot to consider and deal with and a book like it (or another) will at least identify the issues for you.

https://www.amazon.com/Soda-Clay-Fire-Gail-Nichols/dp/1574981676

https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Complete-Health-Safety-Guide/dp/1581152043

Bottom line: wash thoroughly. Wear gloves if you work with solvents. Open the windows.

That is far from the only reason why a a ceramic piece would crack. This book has 9 pages on different kinds of cracks and the reasons why they happen.

http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Wood-Fired-Ceramics-Marc-Lancet/dp/0873497422

http://www.amazon.com/Wood-Fired-Stoneware-Porcelain-Jack-Troy/dp/080198484X/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464209094&sr=1-3-fkmr0&keywords=Woodfiring+principles

Those are my two favourites.

Relevant

Buy Britt's book, then you should need to ask about any other recipe.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Guide-High-Fire-Glazes/dp/1600592163/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381284891&sr=8-1&keywords=complete+high+fire+glaze+book

The White Road

My professor made [very large pots](http://iweb.tntech.edu/wpitelka/gallery/current%20work/current-14.htm
) too.

He also has a fantastic book showing his methods.

(Throwaway account because I don't want any alumni from that school to see the weird stuff I post)