Sometimes no matter how hard you try, a project will go sideways. Ceramics can be sensitive, quirky, and unpredictable. This three-panel fireplace insert is breaking my heart. I feel I've been bickering with the glazes, which I typically think of as friends. I'm grateful the customer is focused on the design and not the time. When the project started in May, I did several color sketches, got the skin tones right, added a thin frame to the outer edge, and tested color combinations to find the best background. I used so many glazes I had to label a photograph to track what color was where. It's a great trick, one I'll repeat. I moved on to glazing the tiles for the fireplace surround.
The first time around, all the glazes fired beautifully but the last panel of the tryptic cracked. I tried making a replacement but the tile fired smaller than the other two and I started over.
The second one fired perfectly but I had inadvertently changed the design and the customer wasn’t as delighted with it as she was with the first one.
At this point, I took a break from the project before doing it again. Rushed and frustrated is not the mood you want to put into anything. I took a week and went back to it with a fresh attitude so I could enjoy the process again. Usually, that works.
On the third set of tiles, the faces fired too dark. On the fourth set, the same happened, and it seems I had smeared the wax I use to outline the drawing on the center tile. I had two solutions for fixing the skin tones. Either I didn't use enough color the first time around, or I didn't use a thick enough coat of white under the glaze to get the correct color. I re-glazed the third set by adding more white and more color, with the fourth set just added more glaze. Adding more glaze was the correct solution.
On this third set of tiles, I fixed flesh tones by adding more white and more glaze. As you can see in the photo the skin colors of the three right figures are muddy.
In this fourth set of tiles, the skin tones are perfect but I still haven’t fixed all the damage that the smeared wax created.
