Techniques for Illustrating Ceramics: 2. Coloured Slips

Coloured slips can create consistent colours on your ceramics. Slip is clay with a high moisture content and as a result is paste like or liquid. Coloured slips add colour to ceramics through the addition of pigments or oxides to slip.

Application

You can apply coloured slip in several ways. Namely, paint it directly on, pour it on or dip the piece in the slip. You will probably need to add several layers of slip to your piece to create a consistent colour. You can able to tell if this is the case if you can see the original colour of the clay through the slip. If you need to add another layer of coloured slip you can do this when the clay is still wet but has lost it’s glossy shine.

Painting

Preserving minute details can be difficult if you need to apply several layers of slip. Therefore I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this method of colouring if you intend to paint intricate details in your work. Unless, of course, that you are trying to achieve a faintly painted line.

Dipping and Pouring

I have found that dipping the piece or pouring slip onto the piece often means that you don’t have to add as many layers. One dip is often enough for a piece to be completely coloured to a desirable thickness. However, the drawback of this is again the difficulty to control the slip. Consequently it’s really only useful for block colouring entire pieces or sections of a piece.

As slip consists of clay it is only able to be used at the greenware stage of the piece. I have found that it is a good way to create a bright and strong base colour to use underglazes on top of.

Top tip

Remember always to test any colours you use before adding them to your final piece. When using a mixture of glazes, underglazes and slips especially it is difficult to predict what the final result will look like. Ceramic colours, whatever they are made from, will look very different before they are fired. My top tip is not to risk your piece and to create small shards or tiles on clay to text your concoctions on first.

If you have nay specific questions on the use of coloured slips, get in touch!

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