Experimentation and iteration
Jan. 8th, 2024 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypseinsurancePlaying with clay using the community studio is a slow process. They do a bisque fire roughly once a month or slightly more frequently, and a glaze firing about the same. If there are classes running it can be a little more frequently. This summer I'd gone to Sherry's and that's where I learned just how different the experience of throwing different clays could be: I used a porcelain there and it was like butter, my skill felt a million times higher than it had previously.
Going into winter I got a box of as many clay bodies as I thought might be remotely interesting ("clay body" is the pottery term for what most people think of as clay, the stuff you shape on a wheel to make cups and things). Since clay can't really be shipped over the winter -- it's bad for it to freeze -- I thought I'd spend the winter testing different clay bodies and in the spring when it came time to renew my supply I'd know which one(s) I wanted to keep working with. I knew that the texture of the clay really affects how it's shaped, different ones behave very differently in all sorts of different ways, and I wanted to settle on one or two I liked so that as I went on to build skill I was building that skill with a material I felt an affinity with.
I got lots of different clays, did I mention that? 11 varieties if I'm counting right. I've worked with 10 of them at least a little. As I've learned it takes awhile to figure out each one, so it's not as simple as making one item out of all of them sequentially; in that case they'd all fail. So I spend a little time with one and then another, but one will pull me back because I have a good idea for it, like that. In practice this means that while I've shaped 10 into at least something, I have not taken nearly that many through a final glaze fire, or really spent enough time to learn them well enough. Glazes will also all react differently to different clay bodies. They will run differently, be different colours, and on some will just not work.
So to thoroughly test a clay I need to throw lots of pots on the wheel with it, see how they dry (the last three I tried cracked a bit as they dried), see how handles pull and attach, see how they work rolling out slabs to make plates (plates crack and warp notoriously), do finishing bits like sanding and smoothing, see how they behave in bisque fire, see how different glazes react on them, and see how they feel in my hands afterwards. You can imagine that if I'm iterating on this process it takes awhile.
And it turns out I like most of them, or at least have a couple purposes they each seem best fit to, while there are some others that are just completely magic. Some notes so far, which I expect to change with use:
M340 plainsman buff: first one I learned on up here, the people who do the wheel-throwing class use it. It's groggy, which means it has a bunch of what feels like sand in it. This makes it stronger but also it abrades my hands if I use it a lot. It's the colour of summer cream, a warm off-white. I didn't enjoy it in the beginning but like with many of these I think it'll be useful for specific effects. It's made of native clays, which means it's cheap and unlikely to be effected by various mineral and mine changes that will impact the more recipe-based clays.
M332 plainsman sandy orange-red-brown: I had high hopes for this one when I got it and although I'm still learning it, I like it very much. It's very rough and groggy, the roughest of all the clays on this list, with a tendency to chew up my fingernails. It also doesn't fully vitrify, that is, it remains a tiny bit porous, which can be an issue for dishwasher and microwave ware (though my test bowls have been fine so far). This roughness, along with its nice medium red colour, allow for some very nice natural rock textures and great friction on the side of cups when it's left raw. If some of the white and black clays feel otherworldly and magical, this clay feels firmly earthy and grounding. Plus it's a native clay and inexpensive.
M390 plainsman red: Another inexpensive native clay, this one is smoother and browner/deeper red than the M332. It's fairly easy to work, and it's a red clay that vitrifies, so its good for work with parts that will be left bare of glaze. I guess because it's inexpensive and easy to work it's also good for anything that will be covered in iron-friendly glazes: the iron that creates the red in this clay can also intensify blues and add interest to whites, for example. Though it's smoother than M332 it's still sandy, more like fine sand, to the touch when it's done if it hasn't been burnished. The particular colour of this one looks amazing if it's highly textured and then the glaze breaks or parts to show bits of the clay colour peeking through.
M370 plainsman smooth white: PDA actually turned me against this one for a bit (someone recommended it, ugh) but I got over that. It's mainly, though not completely, native clays so it has a mid-range price tag. It's the whitest one on this list so far, not cream but closer to real white, and very smooth. It's not as plastic as porcelain, that is, it pushes back a little when it's shaped (or when you make a mistake) but it's still very easy to shape. The surface is very much like a blank page or a blank canvas; I don't find it inspiring but I find it very easy to sit down and throw half a dozen well-controlled shapes, attach the handles easily, and unlike the red and black clays I'm not sad about covering it up with glaze. Although it's not as smooth as porcelain it does take edges well when I texture it without sand particles roughing that clean appearance. It vitrifies well.
P300 plainsman porcelain: Porcelain seems to be much easier to throw than regular earthenware for me (porcelain is mostly smoother and whiter and generally stickier). It just goes where I put it and it stays there. This means I can achieve more even walls and more thoughtful shapes with it, and like the m370 it's a pure white that takes even very fine detail without the clay's texture chiming in. Porcelain isn't a native body here and it's fairly expensive, though this porcelain is a non-translucent one and so is on the cheaper end for porcelains -- about twice the cost of the native bodies. The way it moves on the wheel is inspiring to me in a way the m370 is not. "They" say that porcelain is harder to throw than other clays because it needs more control and can get oversaturated quickly and then lose stability, but maybe because I have less strength in my hands nowadays I can direct the work better without having to muscle anything around. In what sounds like a contradiction I can also move it around more aggressively instead of doing several passes to get to the shape I want. It just feels more like I'm manifesting something in my mind directly with my hands, I guess. The white surface is also gorgeous juxtaposed with the rougher or more coloured reds or black. Because it's so white, when the surface is left raw it can have an otherworldly effect. One of the characteristics of porcelain is that it vitrifies more or less fully, so leaving it raw doesn't decrease its functionality.
Coffee plainsman deep brown: this is a pretty smooth, very dark brown clay that I've tended to hoard because I like it a lot. It's mostly native clays, I think basically a more finely ground M390 base, with another native clay full of iron added in. It has enough surface to look interesting, it plays very well with glazes by shifting what they look like a little but almost always in an interesting and nondestructive way, it's easy to throw. It's pricey, about twice the cheaper native clays so it's up there with porcelain, but it just looks nice and it's fun to use. It, along with M390, were the first colours that evoked the waste land poem for me and it's patiently sitting there with some opal blue glaze as my shower soap dish waiting for me to have my kiln and come back to that inspiration.
IMCO night black: this is very smooth and it makes for lovely lines when throwing. It's priced like a porcelain, and it's a non-native body that contains a lot of manganese. It ends up black, black, black after a glaze firing. It alters glazes intensely since manganese is not just a colourant but also can give metallic effects to glazes at high concentrations. Manganese isn't great to breathe when it's firing, which is fine since we fire overnight at the studio and when I have my kiln it will be in the carport. Sometimes it will react badly with glazes and bloat, blister, or pinhole. All this means that it's not predictable without a lot of work and practice, but that it makes truly otherworldly-looking pieces with glints of metal and purple on the glazes. I am always drawn to unpredictability when making art, or semi-predictability I guess, so I want to do a ton of this and figure it out. Therefore it's on hold mostly until I have my final suite of glazes available, I'd hate to do all the testing work and then have to start again with a different glaze set, but I love love love this clay and I really hope no materials shortages remove it from my reach. It also takes handles better than any other clay.
Georgie's pioneer dark buff, mazama red, dundee red, and trillium porcelain: I got four Georgie's clays. They're from a place that's open outside of work hours, so it's easier for me to ask someone to pick them up and bring them up here, but I haven't spent much time with them yet. All three have a tendency to s-crack on the bottom when they're drying. I haven't glaze fired them yet to know texture or colour. The pioneer dark throws really big quite easily, while the dundee throws like whipped cream (firm peaks).
Going into winter I got a box of as many clay bodies as I thought might be remotely interesting ("clay body" is the pottery term for what most people think of as clay, the stuff you shape on a wheel to make cups and things). Since clay can't really be shipped over the winter -- it's bad for it to freeze -- I thought I'd spend the winter testing different clay bodies and in the spring when it came time to renew my supply I'd know which one(s) I wanted to keep working with. I knew that the texture of the clay really affects how it's shaped, different ones behave very differently in all sorts of different ways, and I wanted to settle on one or two I liked so that as I went on to build skill I was building that skill with a material I felt an affinity with.
I got lots of different clays, did I mention that? 11 varieties if I'm counting right. I've worked with 10 of them at least a little. As I've learned it takes awhile to figure out each one, so it's not as simple as making one item out of all of them sequentially; in that case they'd all fail. So I spend a little time with one and then another, but one will pull me back because I have a good idea for it, like that. In practice this means that while I've shaped 10 into at least something, I have not taken nearly that many through a final glaze fire, or really spent enough time to learn them well enough. Glazes will also all react differently to different clay bodies. They will run differently, be different colours, and on some will just not work.
So to thoroughly test a clay I need to throw lots of pots on the wheel with it, see how they dry (the last three I tried cracked a bit as they dried), see how handles pull and attach, see how they work rolling out slabs to make plates (plates crack and warp notoriously), do finishing bits like sanding and smoothing, see how they behave in bisque fire, see how different glazes react on them, and see how they feel in my hands afterwards. You can imagine that if I'm iterating on this process it takes awhile.
And it turns out I like most of them, or at least have a couple purposes they each seem best fit to, while there are some others that are just completely magic. Some notes so far, which I expect to change with use:
M340 plainsman buff: first one I learned on up here, the people who do the wheel-throwing class use it. It's groggy, which means it has a bunch of what feels like sand in it. This makes it stronger but also it abrades my hands if I use it a lot. It's the colour of summer cream, a warm off-white. I didn't enjoy it in the beginning but like with many of these I think it'll be useful for specific effects. It's made of native clays, which means it's cheap and unlikely to be effected by various mineral and mine changes that will impact the more recipe-based clays.
M332 plainsman sandy orange-red-brown: I had high hopes for this one when I got it and although I'm still learning it, I like it very much. It's very rough and groggy, the roughest of all the clays on this list, with a tendency to chew up my fingernails. It also doesn't fully vitrify, that is, it remains a tiny bit porous, which can be an issue for dishwasher and microwave ware (though my test bowls have been fine so far). This roughness, along with its nice medium red colour, allow for some very nice natural rock textures and great friction on the side of cups when it's left raw. If some of the white and black clays feel otherworldly and magical, this clay feels firmly earthy and grounding. Plus it's a native clay and inexpensive.
M390 plainsman red: Another inexpensive native clay, this one is smoother and browner/deeper red than the M332. It's fairly easy to work, and it's a red clay that vitrifies, so its good for work with parts that will be left bare of glaze. I guess because it's inexpensive and easy to work it's also good for anything that will be covered in iron-friendly glazes: the iron that creates the red in this clay can also intensify blues and add interest to whites, for example. Though it's smoother than M332 it's still sandy, more like fine sand, to the touch when it's done if it hasn't been burnished. The particular colour of this one looks amazing if it's highly textured and then the glaze breaks or parts to show bits of the clay colour peeking through.
M370 plainsman smooth white: PDA actually turned me against this one for a bit (someone recommended it, ugh) but I got over that. It's mainly, though not completely, native clays so it has a mid-range price tag. It's the whitest one on this list so far, not cream but closer to real white, and very smooth. It's not as plastic as porcelain, that is, it pushes back a little when it's shaped (or when you make a mistake) but it's still very easy to shape. The surface is very much like a blank page or a blank canvas; I don't find it inspiring but I find it very easy to sit down and throw half a dozen well-controlled shapes, attach the handles easily, and unlike the red and black clays I'm not sad about covering it up with glaze. Although it's not as smooth as porcelain it does take edges well when I texture it without sand particles roughing that clean appearance. It vitrifies well.
P300 plainsman porcelain: Porcelain seems to be much easier to throw than regular earthenware for me (porcelain is mostly smoother and whiter and generally stickier). It just goes where I put it and it stays there. This means I can achieve more even walls and more thoughtful shapes with it, and like the m370 it's a pure white that takes even very fine detail without the clay's texture chiming in. Porcelain isn't a native body here and it's fairly expensive, though this porcelain is a non-translucent one and so is on the cheaper end for porcelains -- about twice the cost of the native bodies. The way it moves on the wheel is inspiring to me in a way the m370 is not. "They" say that porcelain is harder to throw than other clays because it needs more control and can get oversaturated quickly and then lose stability, but maybe because I have less strength in my hands nowadays I can direct the work better without having to muscle anything around. In what sounds like a contradiction I can also move it around more aggressively instead of doing several passes to get to the shape I want. It just feels more like I'm manifesting something in my mind directly with my hands, I guess. The white surface is also gorgeous juxtaposed with the rougher or more coloured reds or black. Because it's so white, when the surface is left raw it can have an otherworldly effect. One of the characteristics of porcelain is that it vitrifies more or less fully, so leaving it raw doesn't decrease its functionality.
Coffee plainsman deep brown: this is a pretty smooth, very dark brown clay that I've tended to hoard because I like it a lot. It's mostly native clays, I think basically a more finely ground M390 base, with another native clay full of iron added in. It has enough surface to look interesting, it plays very well with glazes by shifting what they look like a little but almost always in an interesting and nondestructive way, it's easy to throw. It's pricey, about twice the cheaper native clays so it's up there with porcelain, but it just looks nice and it's fun to use. It, along with M390, were the first colours that evoked the waste land poem for me and it's patiently sitting there with some opal blue glaze as my shower soap dish waiting for me to have my kiln and come back to that inspiration.
IMCO night black: this is very smooth and it makes for lovely lines when throwing. It's priced like a porcelain, and it's a non-native body that contains a lot of manganese. It ends up black, black, black after a glaze firing. It alters glazes intensely since manganese is not just a colourant but also can give metallic effects to glazes at high concentrations. Manganese isn't great to breathe when it's firing, which is fine since we fire overnight at the studio and when I have my kiln it will be in the carport. Sometimes it will react badly with glazes and bloat, blister, or pinhole. All this means that it's not predictable without a lot of work and practice, but that it makes truly otherworldly-looking pieces with glints of metal and purple on the glazes. I am always drawn to unpredictability when making art, or semi-predictability I guess, so I want to do a ton of this and figure it out. Therefore it's on hold mostly until I have my final suite of glazes available, I'd hate to do all the testing work and then have to start again with a different glaze set, but I love love love this clay and I really hope no materials shortages remove it from my reach. It also takes handles better than any other clay.
Georgie's pioneer dark buff, mazama red, dundee red, and trillium porcelain: I got four Georgie's clays. They're from a place that's open outside of work hours, so it's easier for me to ask someone to pick them up and bring them up here, but I haven't spent much time with them yet. All three have a tendency to s-crack on the bottom when they're drying. I haven't glaze fired them yet to know texture or colour. The pioneer dark throws really big quite easily, while the dundee throws like whipped cream (firm peaks).
no subject
Date: 2024-01-10 02:05 am (UTC)