Stages of slip

As I blended up an ice cream container of slip for my Mishima experiment I thought perhaps I could use some of it for slip painting. I used a humble paint brush to apply this slip to a damp leather hard greenware cup. The design is quite course but I’m hoping to add some finer details after the bisque firing. The benefit of adding my design at this stage is it will be stable during the glazing stage. I can put as much runny glaze on this as I’d like and these blue leaves will go nowhere.

As this is tinted slip, the design is slightly raised. I’m going to rub these down once it is perfectly dry to ensure it has a good hand feel once fired.

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This cup sat on the shelf as I continued my stained slip experiments. I ended up filling a tiny squeeze bottle full of this slip and trailing on some stems. The finer detail really helps. I quite like the added dimension to the texture too. Now I’m looking at the photo, I really should have used a sharp tool to sgraffito some lines into the leaves. Ah well.

I’m hoping this stain won’t move after the bisque firing. It’d be a great way to avoid running of the detail. Then I could use the blue over glazes with abandon!