Glazing Pottery 101 Part 2; How to Pour, Dip & Wipe Pottery

Welcome back everybody. We are going to be beginning part two of this three maybe four part series on glazing. We are going to get our bisque pieces that we cleaned and waxed last week and we're going to be dipping, pouring, and wiping them clean so that they start looking like these pieces in front of us. So that's something that you want to see. Stick around and find out how we do it. So here's our glaze area for our classroom. A lot of studios are more or less the have a lot of glaze in a bucket. You mix it up and you either dip your piece, you pour glaze over it, wipe the bottom, and then you get it turned in. Now for our class it's more or less the same and we are going to be pouring glaze in on the inside of our piece and I'm going to be showing you two different styles for this particular technique. The first one I'm going to do my style that I do for most of my pieces is where I pour the glaze inside, fill it to the brim, then I pour it out, and I dip the rim and then I let it pull out and dry. And so what happens is that creates a top glaze and then after that dries I hold the top and I dip the bottom into the glaze that I want for the second color and that creates a nice interesting overlap. And so that is the one that I like the most because it's just a little easier to do the second dip on the outside. Now some of my students are really enjoying inside one color outside another but this poses more issues because after you pour it in and you pour it out you have to clean up any glaze on the outside and then you're going to have to either palm the top and dip the outside and wherever your fingers touch are going to stay naked or you're going to have to hold it like this and dip the outside and hope that you get all the way to the top so you don't have any naked spots like right here. So this one's a little harder it looks really clean but I'll show you both ways and you can decide which way you like and then in another video I'll show some other glazing techniques if you guys are interested so let me know in the comments below if that's something you want to see. So things that you'll need for glazing you want to get a whisk to mix the glaze, a cup to pour the glaze, a sponge to wipe off any extra glaze and then tongs is used to dip your piece fully if you want to just do a single dip. And so single dips are the easiest when you're learning and all you do, this is an example, it's already glazed you basically get the tongs you clamp it usually on the inside like this so that you have the arms on the inside and outside you fully submerge it into the bucket count to the time that you need to dip it for usually one to three seconds pull it out pour the glaze wipe the bottom and that's more or less done. When you release the tongs it usually leaves little marks called vampire bites and so you just got to fill that in and smooth it out and I can show you that in another video if you guys want to see that. Lots of things to show in glazing so that's why it's a glazing it's such a very time intensive teaching process. All right anyway for my glazes I have on the bucket the name of it on top the name of it on the side and a test tile to show you what the glaze looks like and I have the amount of time you dip it for so in my class I have most of my buckets formulated to dip for one Mississippi some are three Mississippi some are in between so when you dip it you have to dip it for the correct amount of time because if you dip it too long then the glaze gets too thick it can run off or crack and if you dip it for too short it's not going to be the color you want it to be. So anyway you get your bucket take off the lid and then you're going to mix it up so the first thing that I want to show you is a glaze that's unmixed you can see the separation in it so you can see when a glaze hasn't been used for a while all the glaze material settles to the bottom of the bucket and all of the water rides to the top so if you don't mix it well you mostly will get water on your piece and it doesn't get covered if you dip past that water you can see all the glaze material so it's really important that you mix the glaze for a correct amount of time in order to get all the glaze material suspended in the liquid so you have a nice thick glaze that you can dip your piece or pour glaze from here into your piece so let's go ahead and mix the white that we're using so that we can continue our glazing process here's the glaze that we're going to mix we pop the cap off and we set it to the side we grab our whisk and put it in and you can tell that it was already mixed because it looks fairly good now I wouldn't dip my piece in here because I don't know how long ago this was mixed so it's really good to always mix the glaze especially if you don't know when it was last if you saw someone mix it and then you're ready to dip your piece then by all means go for it but always mix just to be safe and so when I mix I like holding the whisk with my hand down like this like I said I'm left-handed and I start with small circles big circles small circles big circles and the goal of mixing is to get all the particles from the bottom of the bucket mixed up into the top and so I want to mix it fast enough where I create a tornado so all the particles from the bottom go up and then I scratch the outside of the bucket the bottom of the bucket and I do this for about 15 seconds going one direction and then I let it settle just to be safe I'm going to do 15 seconds going on the other direction to ensure that this is well mixed so I don't have any extra water in my glaze so once again I'm going to go the other way now so start with small circles then big circles small circles big circles small circles big circles I'm going to speed it up until that tornado forms and I know that wasn't 15 seconds but ideally you should do it for 15 so take my advice if you want all right now when you wash this easiest way to wash it in my opinion just take it walk it over to a bucket of water like this we have our glaze wash station dunk it in the water swish it around a little bit pull it out turn on the water rinse it and then give it a swipe with a sponge to remove any glay particles that may be left and then either put in the dish rack or hang it up where you got it from and that's how we do it in our studio so if you're doing a full dip and your piece is not glazed on the bottom this is how I would recommend doing it you take your tongs you grab your piece you clamp on the inside and the outside of your piece and you dip it for the correct amount of time which would be one Mississippi so let's go ahead one Mississippi pull it out for all the glaze now if you have a wet sponge next to you you can take that and then gently start wiping the bottom to get all that glaze off and then you can wipe more later and you get rid of all that glaze and if you can pop the tongs off sooner than later the odds of you having these little vampire bites are a little less so to fill the vampire bites so you take the brush dip it in the glaze make sure the brush is clean of course and then just lightly tap to fill those vampire bites it's going to look like a lot of liquid but it will dry and level out and you can always scratch it off later if it's too big so fill those as well and then you can see it's already starting to dry so to level out glaze you can either take a needle ideally you should do this outside but if you do it inside make sure that it's over your glaze bucket or a container of water and then you gently just scratch the surface to level out all the unwanted glaze you're taking little increments off at a time because if you take off too much too fast then what you're left with is a big missing chunk glitz you can also use an exacto knife which works really well but same thing take light layers off at a time and just make sure that the glaze powder doesn't become airborne and use your finger to then buff to level it out other side same thing shave until it's level and you might be wondering why do you need to do this some glazes i would say at least most glazes actually um you'll be able to see the thickness so if it's thicker it usually becomes a darker version of itself in that area so if you don't want to see that it is recommended to try to level out any high spots that you don't want to see on the inside it's a little more difficult so you'll probably need a trimming tool for that and then just like you're peeling a vegetable shave that area down and that's one reason why i'm not a fan of dipping entire pieces in a glaze because it can be a little boring just one color and you get vampire bites so i usually dip it in one color and then i dip the top half in a second color but that's for another time all right so this is almost done we got to clean the bottom but let's go ahead and start pouring glaze into our other cups all right so now let's get this piece glazed and so like i said in the beginning if you have tongs just clamp it and fully submerge but i'm going to go ahead and pour the glaze in so i got my measuring cup i got my piece and i'm going to pour it in fill it to the brim pour it out and then dip so i have that glaze go down the side a little bit i kind of mix it up just a little bit and then one thing is you're going to want to have the lid somewhere in reach so that you can put the measuring cup on the lid after that way you reduce the amount of mess you have to clean up so take your piece take your measuring cup pour slowly and then you can speed up the pour fill it to the brim kind of tilt and rotate four and then dip one mississippi two mississippi good now on the bucket lid i said one mississippi is fine but because i'm swishing it around and i'm kind of lifting and doing that i can go a little longer for this particular glaze but make sure you talk to your instructor or teacher for the amount of time you should dip all right and the reason why i don't like just dipping and holding it straight is i like these wavy lines especially because there's wavy lines on my piece i like that type of movement it just makes the piece look a little more interesting in my opinion you kind of see that movement okay now i'm going to let this piece dry at least 30 minutes it's recommended to you wait 24 hours before you dip the outside i'm going to put this aside and i'm going to be going over the next one where you only put the glaze on the inside so for this one same thing pour the glaze in fill it to the brim pour it out and then you either dip only the rim or you just wipe away the excess this one i'm going to show you a different method where you don't need to fill it to the brim actually so the other method if you don't have enough glaze to fill to the brim or you rather not put that much glaze in you pour the glaze in and then you tilt and you rotate and you're not coating all the way to the top now you may have seen some potters they pour and rotate the glaze out so if you do that you basically pour and then you rotate so i'm not the best when i do it with cups i just like pulling to the brim and flip but you more or less can coat everything and then wherever you miss you just brush on or if you know that you can do it really quickly you just take the glaze pour a little bit back in and then pour it out on that spot okay and then if you want glaze on the rim you dip it and then you pull it out and ideally you want to do it all at the same time because if you let the glaze dry and then you dip the rim you're going to get thick glaze in some spots and thinner in the other and it's not going to be even so i dipped a little past the rim so you just take a wet sponge and then just wipe away the glaze that you don't want so then you can dip the outside in the color that you do want so i'm going to go ahead and wipe that away it's just a wet sponge and because i'm getting the clay on the exterior extra wet you definitely should wait a few hours before you dip the outside if you can wait 24 hours even better so i'm going to go ahead and continue wiping this until the glaze is only on the rim and then we're going to use youtube magic to then dip the outside of these pieces all right the next place i'm going to be using is floating blue which is this top glaze but i inverted so i did white on the inside only on the outside for the other cups and so we're going to go ahead and mix this up just like we do dip for our other pieces and we're going to dip so same thing small circles big circles small circles big circles and if it's a low glaze like this and you can mix it fairly evenly and fast 15 seconds should be good okay let's put this on the side and get our pieces dipped all right so to dip the outside i'm going to hold it like this i'm going to submerge it to the height i want it i'm going to move it around to create that waviness i'm going to count to three mississippi i'm going to pull it out and i'm going to use the sponge to wipe all the glaze off the wax without touching the wet glaze on the piece so here we go we got it we palmed it and we're going to go ahead and dip ready let's go one mississippi two mississippi three mississippi pull it out shake it you can see the magic of what wax did and then i'm just going to gently start wiping away the excess that's on the wax and then later on i'm going to do a final wipe to clean the rest where there's still some left we'll put this on the side and the full dipped piece you can double dip pieces some all the way down to the bottom but as you're learning what the glazes do and how much it runs i only recommend dipping about halfway and as a normal dip this would be three seconds but since it's a double dip i would reduce it to one second because if glaze goes on too thick it can either one crack and then it pops off and then you have to reglaze everything or two it's too thick and it runs off the piece like you saw in the other so i'm going to go ahead palm the bottom and one recommendation i do have is you actually wipe this clean ready to turn in so as soon as you finish dipping the rim you just put on the shelf to turn in but you palm the bottom dip one mississippi and pull it out and same thing with a dip move it around and pop it out one mississippi and pop and then some of the glaze got on the inside and that's fine it's going to create a cool look i'm gonna go ahead and put this on the side and i'm gonna go and do the final piece right the final piece for this video the one that only the glaze will be on the outside this is the most difficult because you have to dip all the way to the rim without the glaze going in now if you want this whole section to be pure white you have to then brush on any glaze that you may have missed but if you don't mind the rim being a different color you can just flip it and then dip the outside and the rim to cover where you miss and that's what i'm going to do so i'm gonna take my piece and then you either have to hold it like this and dip or hold it like this and dip i prefer this way dip for three seconds and pull it out and you i like going in fast and i slow down to get the rim perfectly dipped so here we go one mississippi two mississippi three mississippi and pull and i made a common mistake which all of you will probably make eventually is the bucket glaze was too low for me to fully dip all the way so i'm gonna have to flip it over and dip the rim anyway i can wipe the excess glaze from the bottom and i can clean that up a little later but you can see how clean that bottom edge is with the wax so that wax did a great job resisting so you can either leave it naked or you can add glaze and if you want to add glaze either dip the same color from the top going down which is the white the top glaze or you can dip the outside glaze from the bottom going up and i'm gonna do the top going down so i'm gonna go a really fast dip now the downside of overlapping your glazes is you'll have a line and that line will become a darker version of the color itself so if you are doing the same color you may see a line of the same glaze but a darker version my recommendation is you dip the top color whatever that is down so i'm gonna wipe a little bit of this glaze off because i don't want it too thick here and i'm gonna dip it in the white so i'm gonna wipe a little bit so i don't want it too thick because that was nearly a double dip on the rim wipe a little off ideally you should wait until this dries completely but for youtube purposes and demo purposes i gotta get this dip pretty quick so i'm gonna go ahead move this and i'm gonna dip it in the white so that's why i like having my inside glaze coming half down because there's just less room for error and i actually like the mix of these two colors white over this so i'm actually going to dip a little further down so here we go dip okay so it's not that full color that we talked about earlier but i like this overlap that's going to occur here so i think that looks really cool so we're going to go ahead and get this wiped on the bottom and then we are done with our first round of glazing so here are the dip pieces that we did a day ago so you can see my shirt is different now and we are going to go ahead and wipe the bottoms clean so that we can get into the kiln so a few things that you'll need is a container of water a sponge of your choice and i like a big car wash sponge as well these are just car wash sponges cut into sixes and an exacto knife or needle for scraping any extra glaze off so we're going to get started on this piece this is the one that we just fully dipped no wax on the bottom and we dip the rim so we're going to move these out of the way and so for this piece as you can see in the point of view and on top of the camera there's still glaze on the bottom and there's some on the foot ring so whenever you just dip your piece you're just wiping i would recommend a big car wash sponge because to clean the bottom all you need to do is grab your piece put it onto the car wash sponge and just move it around like this and as you wipe it will slowly start taking away whatever is on the bottom and so you can see on the sponge that there's some residue and on the piece itself now this bottom clean bottom foot is more or less glaze free and it's taking a little bit off of here as well now for pieces if you end up glazing all the way down to the bottom this edge right here you want to take off at least a sixteenth of an inch of place i recommend for brand new glazes that you're if you are familiar with the glaze you can go as low as an eighth of an inch and if you're really familiar you know it's not going to run 16 is all you really need but as you're learning it's always better to do more and then slowly do less as you are learning the glazes and so this bottom edge i i would recommend wiping a little more for this piece anyway this is a gloss white it's pretty stable but you can then wipe by hand to get a little higher or as we compress and push more the sponge will wipe higher up and then remove more glaze so you can just push a little more and then just wipe and as you do that this will get more covered in glaze so then you just flip it over and use the other side and then lastly i just do a swipe across and i move it around and now my edge is even higher than it was before and on the bottom looks like there's a little bit of residue so i just do another swipe with the sponge and this inside edge i may have to wipe by hand so i have to do that i just use a sponge and water and then i just compress and then that's my back and forth to clean that up and then that basically is done and ready to fire i'll get myself a cookie that can fit on the foot then i fire now one last thing this is a student-made piece and if you end up glazing the very inside the bottom you have to make sure that this bottom is not the same height as the foot so what you got to do is get something flat put it across the center and look at the spacing between that flat object and the foot itself this inside is basically touching the piece of wood that means that as this melts it might get stuck to whatever it touches in this case it'll get stuck to the middle of the cookie and then it will pop off and leave behind um kiln wash on here so with that being said i would have to wipe a little ring in here a little circle so i'll take my sponge and just move it around and i'll take a little more off the center so that that middle section is not touching the edges of the foot so that's why it's really important when you trim a foot and you trim the inside you make sure that you lower this enough where you have clearance so it's not so close so this is more or less done i would put this in the kiln whenever it's ready to fire all right so these other piece the beveled edge this one i would just wipe all the glaze off of the bottom and then the little increments over here and there's a little bump here a little bump of glaze that i would um shave off with exacto knife so the first step that i would do is i would get my sponge and then i would just do it by hand and not use the car wash sponge so i compress it when i wipe i'm putting it right up against that edge line and i'm only wiping with my fingertip and i want to make sure as i'm wiping i'm wiping with the sponge touching the wax side so i wipe from this side wiping this way i would take off all the glaze from this edge so i compress put it up on the edge and then move it back and forth to get a nice clean glaze line so i'll just work my way around clean up the little edges that i want to make nice and clean and i rotate and one thing to remember as you're wiping you want to make sure that your hand that is touching the piece is dry if you this hand is wet you'll start pulling off glaze because this is very powdery it's very ashy the more you touch it the more you swipe the more glaze is going to get on your fingers so be very mindful of how you touch your piece because you can easily over touch it and start removing glaze from the surface and you won't really know what the repercussions will be until after it's glaze fired so you just wipe get that edge nice and clean i like that nice clean line i don't like having little bumps or fuzziness so depends on how neurotic you want to be i always want a nice clean glaze edge so i spend the extra few minutes to make it nice and pretty okay and then your lines if you have words on the bottom make sure that you get all that glaze out if you don't want to see glaze in there lastly i have these little droplets here so you want to be able to you can scratch those off to level it out and i do recommend you do it because sometimes that can drip or it just creates a darker version of itself in that specific color so when you do this this should be done in a well ventilated area and you should wear an n95 mask and ideally you should have a container of water to let the powder go into it but to do it you get an exacto knife you go up to that edge and then you just generally start shaving off that clay shaving off that glaze so that it becomes flush or the same height as the area around it and as you shave it that looks pretty good and you can either take your finger and swipe it if you dip it in water you can smooth it out a little more granted it's not fully wet and you can do that as much or as little as you want i have a little another little bit over here so i'm going to go ahead and shave that down and it is pretty satisfying but you've got to be careful taking small layers off at a time if you try to take the whole thing off at once you're most likely going to pull all the glaze off and you're left with naked spot in that one area i'm going to take this off too it's always really satisfying to do this this off too and lastly i have a little glaze drip from the white so i'm going to go ahead and take that off so like i said this is not required um it can be fine it usually smooths out the majority of the area but if it's really clumpy you might like i said see a darker version of that color in that spot so if you want to add a little bit of water you can help kind of blend that glaze but like i said if you put too much you might pull the glaze off okay that looks good bottom looks good this one is ready to fire all right lastly the one that has the foot waxed same steps as before you get your sponge get it wet and you are wiping all the glaze off the foot off the inside of the foot and the outside of the foot i want to make sure i get all the glaze off i don't want to see any glaze there because little drops of color on the bottom kind of detract away from the overall feel of it so a little bit of wiping goes a long way in my opinion and on the sides same thing compress my finger on top i'm just working back and forth to remove any unwanted glaze and then when i rotate i grab from the foot and i rotate this way or i can put it like this and i rotate my hand and i grab it that way i don't really get my wet hand touching the piece and same thing nice clean glaze line dip the sponge in the water as necessary and swipe back and forth it looks pretty good there's a little bit of a bulkiness there so i can take it and then gently level that off and then lastly wet finger just to swipe the dust off and then sponge to finish the wipe all right and that is done so i have my three pieces glazed in slightly different styles and i'm going to go ahead and load this in the kiln and then in the next video we will unload it take a look at how it is talk about it a little bit and then i'll show you how i get my bottoms perfectly smooth using some sanding blocks and the pottery wheel so if that's something that you folks want to see make sure you like and subscribe so you can see that video when it's released and hopefully you learn something new with all this glazing and this is so i hope to make more glazing videos in the future and if there's any glazing technique that you guys want to see in particular don't forget to comment that in the comment section below and until then as always thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video