Glaze Development

Spring of 2025 has been dedicated to developing glazes! Started with some basic clay and glaze chemistry, moved into developing glaze recipes for a personal project. I am drawn to highly texturized, colorful glazes ( Brian Rochefort and Linda Bloomfield are huge inspirations), and decided to experiment with lava/crawl glazes. After dozens of tests, many failures, and many pivots due to ingredient shortages, I developed my new favorite glaze :D
Based on the recipe "Brain Coral Crawl / Lichen Crawl" from Jake's Glaze (glazy link below!), I used his recipe with a substitute of Laguna Borate and the addition of Silicon Carbide + Mason Stain to make what I'm calling "Lumpy Pickled Lava"!! The combination of the highly textured lava and the crackly separating base is so fun, and to me, when covering a large surface, is reminiscent of landscape satellite imagery or views of untouched land one might see from an airplane. I'm enjoying testing the differences in glaze outcomes dependent on application techniques, specific gravity, firing temperatures, etc.  I'm partial to cone 4 firings with application thickness varying throughout the piece. The final product can feel magical yet natural over underglaze, which I'm obsessed with.
Below are some results of the testing that took place between February and April 2025 :)

Playing with color to find the right shade via a quad blend! Used the same base recipe with four different mason stains: #6404 (Vanadium), #6027 (Tangerine), #6097 (Red), #6088 (Dark Red)... not exactly sure why the back right glaze expanded so intensely, but I LOVE the moldy look

different view of some favorites from the quad blend

No clue what happened with this dude, but I'm deeply in love with the mix of color and the sort of saggy, sack-like blobs. I plan on working towards this outcome a bit more intentionally as soon as I am back in the stu!

a high contender for my final project! I started looking for a vivid pink, and this was as close as I got to the color in my head. 

Fun experiment with layering! This is absolutely something I plan on experimenting with more in the future. Loving the  gobstopper-esque look

Came very close to using this on my final piece as well, but my gut said to try for a more vivid yellow/green shade - very glad I did!

Experimenting with #6464 stain concentrations 

The lumpy pickled lava in all of its glory! Obsessed with the leftmost test, but due to the scale of the work I was trying to glaze I ended up using a lower concentration of stain (mason stains are expensive... #sponserme!)
base recipe (thank you Jake!!): https://glazy.org/recipes/27803
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