1st try (Growlmon)
Sigh Alright. I keep trying to make ancient copper but accidentally keep making glazes along the way. I recently found out the Ancient copper (AC) glaze is a Matt glaze but for some reason is not in the Matt part of the stull chart, I still think most kaki reds are low end crystal glazes. Not crystal in the large blossom zinc crystals way that most of you think of when people say crystal glaze, I mean crystals in that the ingredients in the recipe that have a crystal or latis structure. The glaze might have crystals but at the end of the day it is a red / orange glaze with Mg0 , phosphorus, and calcium. Is calcium and/or magnesium a crystal in structure? shrug . I do not know and I don't feel like looking it up.
So I put together a Matt glaze. 10% silica, high alumina. On the first try I made a very good representation of what I wanted using the stull chart alone. A mostly red Matt glaze. The slight black is the part I do not like but I think we can get rid of that by reducing something. This glaze will need to be refined but for now its a really good base. I’m slowly learning iron saturated oxidation reds live in a very balanced place. From what I read from others who have blazed the path before me you need a specific amount of iron, phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium for reds to be reds. What amount? Who knows. For now this new Growlmon glaze looks great.
Two small notes; Almost all of my tiles here are b-mix with grog fired to cone 04 and all of them are double dipped above the first line, the bottom of the tile is always a single dip. It’s good to see this glaze does not have much variation even when thick. Before we go further I want to say I will not be giving out the recipe to these glazes in this post. I just want to describe how I achieved them and introduce you to them. That being said if you aretying to make a glaze like this I think this post will be helpful.
This is the first shot at my red Matt glaze. I call it Growlmon
Back of test tile view. See that little orange bit on the bottom left? That's that color I want little more of.
Growlmon with 1% zinc oxide to see if I can increase the melt. I see no real difference here.
Back of test tile with 1% zinc oxide added to original recipe.
What a great surprise. Added 2% more zinc ox to the last test (making the recipe +3% zinc oxide) and got this. Amazing Greymon like glaze with little metallic Matt looking glaze. I think I'll call it….. Meta Greymon.
Back of test tile really shows the color along with the metallic bits.
I very very often make a glaze and put either 3% TiDi in the be of 3% zinc in the base. At times I get lucky and make an offshoot of a glaze. This is one of those cases. In my experience too much iron and zinc don’t work well together but this is just the right amount. I do realize (and I hope most of you do as well) that most glaze lines are a base glaze, modified with colorants and flux materials. I have also leaned to do this. If I get good glaze out of a test I immediately do a line test to see how either zinc, manganese,titanium dioxide, ect, will effect the color. Most of the time it only takes 2-3 % and anything over that starts to hit limits. But even that small amount (2-3%) effects the color way more than the structure or base glaze in a negative way.
