8 easy ways of experimenting with decorative glazing

There’s nothing like a beautiful glaze to finish off a piece of pottery. It brings out the colours of the pot and enhances otherwise dull-coloured clay. To learning how to do decorative glazing these easy steps will set you up.

As well as making a pot more aesthetically pleasing, glazing makes pottery non-porous. It allows you to be creative with your finishing as you can brush it or dip your glazed pottery.

Glaze is coloured by the addition of various metallic oxides.Once you have tested your glazes and applied them in a conventional way, you can experiment with special effects. Have fun with these special techniques!

• Try layering colours one over the other and overlapping a matt glaze with a shiny glaze.
• You can apply a base glaze to a pot and then apply other glazes using different techniques, such as brushing with a few different-sized paint brushes or roughly spong­ing one glaze over another. You can cut the sponge into circles, squares or other shapes.
• Try applying stencils over the base glaze. Cut or tear a range of shapes from a sheet of newspaper, dampen the paper so that it will stick to the glazed surface and then apply a colour by gently pouring it over or by using a sponge or brush.
• If you have applied several coats of glaze, you can try a technique called sgraffito. Simply draw designs with a pointed tool, scratching deep into the glaze surface or right into the clay to reveal the colours.
• Another interesting technique is to paint on the clay surface with a cold wax solution before glazing. When the wax burns off in the kiln, there will be areas of clay left unglazed.
• Try drawing with children's wax crayons, which will have exactly the same effect. In the kiln the wax burns away completely leaving no colour from the crayon.
• You can further experiment by "slip trailing" with a small plastic bottle which has a nozzle. Make a small hole in the nozzle by snipping the top off or piercing it with a hot darning needle so you can squeeze a fine line of glaze through it. This will give a linear pattern and is an ideal tool for drawing on a glazed surface.
• You do all these techniques before you glaze fire the item.

Using decorative techniques is a sure way to turn an ordinary pot into a piece of art. These fun and easy steps will having you creating beautiful pieces in no time.