Colouring oxides are added to glazes to produce colour. They dissolve in the glaze to produce transparent glazes with more depth than those made using commercial stains. I prefer to add only small amounts of colouring oxides to give pale, watery transparent glazes.
Copper oxide and chrysocolla (copper silicate mineral)Cobalt oxide and skutterudite (cobalt arsenide)Iron oxide and haematite.Chromium oxide and chrome diopside (silicate pyroxene mineral)Rutile in pink and yellow glazes and rutile crystals.Monazite sand containing the rare earth oxides neodymium, praseodymium and erbium.Nickel oxide and annabergite (nickel arsenate mineral). Pot by Avril Farley.Vanadium pentoxide and vanadinite (lead vanadate chloride crystals)Manganese dioxide and rhodonite (manganese silicate mineral)
The glaze recipes are in my book The Handbook of Glaze Recipes. The book shows how to make a wide range of subtly coloured glazes predominantly using the colouring oxide rather than commercial stains.
My next book Science for Potters is coming out later this year.
Stoneware and porcelain glazes are made up of at least four ingredients: silica, feldspar, whiting and clay. This is what they look like in their raw mineral forms. Silica is ground flint or quartz, usually from sand or sandstone. These are large pieces of milky quartz from a vein in igneous rock.
Quartz
Silica has a high melting temperature. In order to melt in a kiln, it needs a flux. The main flux in stoneware and porcelain glazes is feldspar, found in granite, an igneous rock composed of the minerals feldspar, quartz and mica. This piece of granite from Devon has both muscovite (silver, sparkly) and biotite (black, crystalline) mica. The dark vein is mafic rock, high iron and magnesium. Granite forms when molten magma cools and solidifies. The darker minerals solidify first, then the feldspar and finally the quartz, often in large veins running through the rock. Slow cooling, deep in the earth’s crust results in large crystal size.
Granite: feldspar (white), quartz (grey) and mica (black)
Clay contains both alumina and silica and is added to increase viscosity to prevent the glaze from running off the pot when molten in the kiln. Clay also helps to keep the heavier quartz and feldspar suspended in water in the glaze bucket.
Clay, dried and powdered
Calcium carbonate added in the form of whiting is an extra flux which helps to stabilise the glaze and can also produce a matt glaze surface. Whiting is ground up chalk or limestone.
