How To Use Ceramic Underglaze Pencils

Underglaze pencils pens and crayons can be great for ceramic artists who may have started with a background in painting or drawing.

How to use ceramic underglaze pencils.

Cone 5 for brown and yellow and cone 05 for rose. Then using a tool like a loop tool carve through the glaze to the clay body below. Next apply the color to make your design as you would on a watercolor painting. This video is a step by step guide to using underglazes to add an illustrative design to your ceramics.

Close one end of the straw and put it vertically for drying. Wrap a small page of newspaper around the handle of the spoon and fix it with a rubber then remove from the spoon in order to create a straw. The reason for this is that you have to apply some pressure to the pencil to leave a mark. To achieve this look first apply a layer of underglaze to a wet or leather hard vessel and let the glaze dry.

A good rule of thumb is to work from the light colors to the darker hues and to build areas from washes of color underneath to an overlay of detail. Fill the syringe with the creamy paste previously prepared and fill the paper straw with the paste with the syringe. Apply the underglaze pencil to bisque ware to create a variety of unique decorative designs. Underglaze pencil patterns will show up through painted underglaze and glazes applied to your pottery.

Sgraffito is a decorative technique in which an artist scratches through a layer of glaze to reveal the clay body beneath. Likewise older students enjoy them for decorative possibilities underglaze pencils are great as a 2 d medium that you can use in the 3 d world of ceramics and for those relatively new to the discipline this can result in beautiful work from the very start. Underglaze decorating pencils are ideal for shading fine line drawing or identification. In areas where you want the illusion of contour use a dark underglaze pencil and then smudge the pencil in the direction of the contour using a blending stump figure 11.

So you can use a combination of drawing and painting to create a detailed effect. When you are used to working with paint brushes pastels or pencils to create imagery dipping a piece into a glaze bucket or trying to paint with glazes that are immediately sucked up by the porous bisque surface can take some getting used to. It is best to use underglaze pencils on bisque fired pottery. Maximum firing temperature is cone 10 for blue black and green.

The maximum firing temperature is cone 10 for blue black and green cone 5 for brown and yellow and cone 05 for rose. I ll show you how to create solid opaque images as w.