Do you always have to mix colors thoroughly?
The Mason website has listings of all the colors available with a guide showing which ones are suitable for using in clay bodies and which ingredients to avoid in your clear glazes.
Why does this matter? Every clay body has ingredients in it that can react to a colorant. Sometimes that lovely pink fires green or the blue fires pink because of it. If your clear glaze has the wrong ingredient in it, it will change the colors or bleed them.
You can be reasonably safe if you stick with their guidelines, but safe is not always fun. I have tried dozens of other stains with great results. The trick is to test every single batch you blend in order to see what happens to the color with and without a glaze. Then you can decide whether to keep using it or not.
I had a pink stain that fired the most lovely pale green. I liked it and kept using it, but since I have the attention span of a gnat, I quickly forgot the pink was really green and ruined a pattern with the wrong color.
This is why I use the ones that look like the end product.
I would encourage you to buy an ounce or so of different colors and give them a try. Some are incredibly beautiful and are colors you cannot achieve by simply mixing two primaries.
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Do you always have to mix colors thoroughly?
No. You can mix them in many ways and get great results.
Mixing them in wet or dry you can stop at any point to achieve swirls of color or small specks of color through the clay. You can thoroughly mix the colors then gently knead it into white, stopping when you like the pattern.
Set a bit aside to dry then crush it and knead it back into the white clay for yet another look. You can add multiple colors dry or wet. I have scraped swirls off dry clay and pressed them carefully to keep the shape. There are no rules, so try anything.
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You cannot reach Alaska just by wandering North. You need a map and a plan.”
I believe in the power contained in the simple act of writing down your goals, so I strongly encourage you to do it. Too many years slip past with no evident markers. You can feel as though you have not accomplished anything when in reality, you have. You just don’t have any way of knowing if you have not kept track of your plans. Give yourself this gift in January so you can enjoy it next December.
The map is a simple statement of your goals. The plan is a list of steps you need to take.
Make the goals realistic and the steps achievable. Don’t defeat yourself by setting huge goals with impossible deadlines. If you finish reasonable goals early, you can make a new plan.
Post this plan somewhere you will see it every day.
Have a fat marker nearby so you can cross out steps when done.Of course the first goal is to make a plan, so that is one line you can stroke out immediately after you are done!
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Q: Why color your own clay? There are places to buy it pre-colored and that seems like a lot less work.
Yes, you can buy pre-made colored clay and there is nothing wrong with doing so. The reason I don't is because I want to choose my own colors, have them as dark or as light as I want and I want to use my own porcelain clay body.
One supplier I called would not tell me what the basic clay body was that they were making it from. Without this information it is impossible for me to lighten their pre-set color or use white along with it to make a pattern.
I like vibrant colors and use a lot more Mason Stain by % than they do. I can always lighten them up by adding white.
Even though it is a messy job, it is also a very simple job to color clay.
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