What Is Colored Slip In Ceramics

One method of decorating pottery is to do slip paintings.

What is colored slip in ceramics.

Slip decoration is an ancient technique in chinese pottery also used to cover whole vessels over 4 000 years ago. Slip is usually the consistency of heavy cream. It is applied to wet or soft leather hard greenware. Utilizing tracing paper or stencils can help students achieve even more detailed results with this process.

It s simple to do just mix up some slip from your waste clay sl. Lana wilson uses texture and clay slip to decorate much of her work. The effect looks like the clay is dissolving. The colored slip is essentially a decorative coating much like an engobe applied to a thrown or handbuilt form but in this case the coating is laid down first.

Slip is often used in decoration. To make the colored slip ball mill 100 grams of stain per gallon of white casting slip and let them mix for two hours 14 lbs. It may be left the natural color of the clay body from which it is made or it may be colored with oxides. Of casting slip is roughly equivalent to one gallon.

A quick video showing how i make firstly the slip for the under glazed colour for my pottery. Bone dry clay will slake down into slip faster than slightly wet clay exspecailly if you take a rolling pin to the dry clay to break it up into small bits. Selectively applying layers of colored slips can create the effect of a painted ceramic such as in the black figure or red figure pottery styles of ancient greek pottery. When clay is dry the water will dislodge the particles of clay from one another.

Multiple colored slips can be applied to create pictures or designs on the damp or leather hard clay surface. Once the slip layer is dry students can scratch into the surface to draw in a design. It s a a lot of fun to do washes of color on textured surfaces leaving concentrations of the glaze or ceramic colorants in the recesses. Like traditional painting slip painting is usually done with a brush because the slip can also be trailed or dabbed on with a sponge or the fingers.