7 Variations of Drippy Slip Application

all right today's video is going to be on a few things i've learned recently about slip application and drippy sloppy pieces so i've been doing them for a few years but always doing them the same way and the designs i've done recently the firstly the magma then the rainbow and now northern lights have really made me think about how i apply it so i've kind of gone back to the drawing board a bit and um started thinking more about that and i wanted to do a quick video well not that quick actually but a video showing what i've learned so to start with you'll need slip i've got a video showing how i make it but it's just dried um trimmings so i collect my clay when um yeah get all the scraps in a bucket add water to them and then i've got a slip i don't add anything fancy to it but i do color it so i've got black and white slip to show you the marbling effect i just use these cheap syringes um the it doesn't really matter you can get a lot of them on amazon and it doesn't matter the specifics but there are two kinds that i've seen these screw heads that take attachments and then the ones that are offset and um just have a push fit for attachments so when i say attachments i mean things like these narrower heads will fit on with some of them they screw in with some of them in fact on the battery screen yeah so they seem to be fairly standard if you're going to use them screw attachments are nice but in theory you shouldn't be applying so much pressure that the friction fit ones don't work and the reason i prefer these ones is because the offset head makes it easier to get rid of air bubbles and the um there's less cleaning because these ones have uh an outer bit with a screw thread and in a bit so to get slippers that's a pain so i'd recommend these ones they're cheap they wear out you'll probably have to replace them fairly often if you do something like this because the slip seems to um kind of scratch the surface so what i do is i throw my pieces the day before i leave them on the bats so they can re-return to the wheel this is hardly a noble russian doll bat system um the advantage of doing it this way is that they're still centered firmly attached and what i can do i'll show you the process quickly i'll do a i think i have a full video on this but if i don't i'll re-do it and it's definitely a blog post um but you can trim while they're attached so you can take off the wall the advantage to this is you can feel how thick the wall is as you go because you've got access to both sides so i essentially do the majority of my trimming before adding the slip which is necessary because you then can't trim the walls once you've added it and so that would be basically my process and i get a fairly sharp rounded rim to my pieces so i think it's a nicer drinking experience so i just trim those and then burnish them with a bit of plastic this is the bag that the clay comes in so that's how i would prepare my pieces and then i have a few of them and i'm going to demonstrate a few different ways you can apply a slip so to start with kind of the most basic way of doing it would be to have and all of these are going to just have black and white slit obviously you can do a whole range of colors and i generally color those with mason stains because the oxides don't tend to give that nicer color so one color in each you want to avoid air bubbles or cost which is where the uh the fabric the nozzle on these is at the top makes it a bit easier to get rid of it so what you'll have to do is once you've filled them up just tap them on something for a while to get all the air to come up because the slip's quite thick it's not going to bubble up readily but it will last a little while and then just take the top off and that should get rid of the air bubbles um it's very hard to avoid them all together but worth taking a little bit of extra time to try and avoid it so first application i'm just going to alternate bands of them which would work exactly as you expect um and what i will also do is i'll show you straight bands versus um variation in thickness because what i would normally do is vary the thickness so you add a band a slit like that i don't know if you can hear in the video but there were a few air bubbles in there which isn't ideal you can sort of deal with them but um best to avoid if possible so i'm gonna mark out where all the bars are gonna go i'll do six alternating so there's a fairly even in thickness obviously there's a bit of variation from where you start and end um but you can exaggerate it so we'll leave the top band as it is this one i'll do a bit so just by pulsing the application you can see there's a variation in thickness and then this one i'll do more and then repeat with the black [Music] band about with a bit of variation and a lot of variation so then this is where having it attached really helps because if you're trying to do this and it's not attached to something you'll bounce up each time so again well worth leaving them on the back if possible so that is take one and you can see how the top bands tend to slide down because there is a slight variation in thickness this light grouping um but they slide down fairly uniformly so if you'd have done that the whole way down you'd have even bands these ones have bigger pulses so they're coming out as um just single big waves that's how i tended to do it for the um the normal drippy slippy ones which are blues and the white clays off-white so it sort of looks like the ocean and waves crashing on the shore and these ones have more frequent ways so you can see they're wobbling but um you get more variation but as a result the kind of the frequency is greater but the variation um is a bit reduced because you're adding more but that is kind of the most basic way of doing it then and you can see there if you get an air bubble sometimes that you get an air bubble like that you catch in time you can just patch it up you have to take the tip off it but that's better than a hole because the reason the air bubbles are so bad is because the glaze will generally not fill them or will highlight them if it does so they're always obvious where if you can fill them and smooth them out which you can do more easily when it's one color um you can actually repair them effectively uh yeah best to avoid them wherever possible so take one you've got two syringes one color in each and you alternate the banks next way of doing it and do two colors but i'm going to marble them on the piece and all these other pieces have had the the trimming and the version already done so what i would do with this is add some snip first color and then add some slip up second color this is a a kind of this is the sort of thing i'm now doing for the northern light swat pieces um which i'm still working on exactly how they're going to come out but you do almost entirely black and then just a flash of a color and then as you can see where you get that sort of gradient between the two obviously for northern lights that's a that's exactly how you want it to look because that's how the modern light 2 looks you get the flash of color and then that soft gradient i mean whether or not you like that design of peace um up to you i'm not so keen on this one it's hard to get it really marbled which i think if you're going to marble it that's what i would go for but obviously i said with a specific application like the northern lights one this way gives you far more control and should let you create a specific effect so useful in that regard the next one is how i normally do it so this will be with two colors in the same syringe and i will use this ring shape we've got um white in it already just clean it off on a sponge between because you don't want to contaminate the two so now you can't see it because it's just the white on the outside but it's now half white half black and then what i think i'll do is the same again so more white one thing i've learned from the rainbow pieces is that you for a medium to large piece are going to hold around 350 to 450 ml when it's fired you want about 30 ml of slip possibly even just a bit less than that but that's a nice amount to have useful to know especially if you're trying to do an application where you use everything actually i'll come to one of those i'm going to show you how i'm doing application when you've got marbled slip in the syringe and you're trying to get rid of air bubbles i just catch the first little bit on the sponge because that will contain the air bubbles because they move up to the top corner so marbled slip this is how so i do this application there's a marbled in one syringe um done fast i think but you can do it fast and slow and they will give different patterns so this is what i'm kind of doing with the magma so what i would do with this is you apply your bands and you have to kind of pay a bit of attention to how the colors are marbled in the syringe because the more colors you've got the more likely there are pockets of it and sometimes you can apply like this i've used half of what was in the syringe or thereabouts and actually that could quite easily is that even in focus really has that happened it's not too bad it'll be annoying if that's all been out of focus yeah so you use half but you can end up with that missing one color entirely um anyway so what i do is i add some and then the reason you want the greater speed is that that gives you more horizontal bands so you can exacerbate that by doing one final pass up with each one which gives you a surface layer of more exaggerated bands which should mean you get more a couple of layers like strata to it and actually that's not as exaggerated as i was hoping but i think it will be when it's fired but you get all the horizontal banding to it the next one i will do the same thing but slow so i'll need to top that syringe up and then what you get when you do the same thing slower is rather than really exaggerating this strata to the horizontal to get more variation as you go around the piece it's more noticeable when you've got a lot of colors on there this should come out more like the um the second piece where it's marbled but it's not that exhausting i think that's enough [Music] yeah so you get this isn't the best example of it but um you'd get more if there's more variation in the slip you get more variation around rather than in the horizontal bands with all of these techniques it's very random so how the piece ends up looking is there's a large element of chance to it right i'm going to abandon that syringe because the next one is how i'm doing the rainbow slip so what i want to do is i'm just going to do half and half so 15 ml of light you can also trap air bubbles in the application and unfortunately that's also quite hard to avoid um so what you want to avoid as much as possible is having two bands of slit meat because they'll trap air underneath them so if you just do a continuous band each time that seems to avoid the worst of it right so this is one continuous helix from top to bottom so you just rather than doing discrete bands you just start at the top and work your way down which is where having knowing how much slip you need is a good thing because especially when you're doing the rainbow one you've marbled all the colors in if you run out halfway down or you've got twice as much as you need it's not going to work so to get all the colors distributed in one continuous thing you need to know how much you need um and that will be about this much so it's actually less of a constant gradient but you can kind of see how it's more black mixture more white which is what you'd expect obviously first in first last out so whichever color you put in first is at the bottom of the syringe and it's the last one out so there you've just got you've got more bands because of how many essentially layers you've got as you turn when you go down the piece um works better with more colors obviously because then you get a gradient that's more obvious this one hasn't exactly it's not necessarily the best demonstrations of it but should give you the idea um this is one i haven't done for a while but i'm going to do another marble in the same syringe mix and this is done without the wheel turning okay so what i'd do with this one is just do a blog and then i'm not sure if this will i don't think it makes any difference how you go about doing it i might start doing too much hassle so if you have two colors you can alternate it's hoping the gradient in these will end up working quite well but we'll see i think the gradient's going to work quite nicely around the piece but i don't know how it's going to look when they join back up does it seem to start more or less solid black it's going to be quite obvious and i also don't know if i'm adding enough here almost certainly not right so there you've got this is where you don't want your slip to be too thick because those spikes will remain no spikes but hopefully this is about right it might go back now i'll do it like this see what happens you can learn together so they've joined together that's the sort of gradient that i was expecting so you've got the marbling in each one um might be better to do i don't know how you'd avoid them joining up rather than having them further apart it might be a technique that needs to be played with more but yeah it is if you wanted something that looked like that then there you go and then the last one is something people have asked about periodically because it combines two things what happens if you put slip on a swirly and i haven't done this for so long but i really don't know the last time i tried it didn't really work so i think it would be better to do either lots of slip at the top and have it run down over it or more lightly put the slip on the high point and i am going [Music] to try putting the slit only on the high point because i think that will probably work better i don't know it's very hard to say you have to add quite a lot and interestingly obviously i could do with the wheel turning the other direction which i can interesting how i guess because the motor's kind of bedded in in one direction this is a weird noise right let's go for it so i'm looking for the point hard to see where it comes off all right let's see what that is right before i forget [Music] well i don't like it but then as a general rule i kind of think most of the time combining two designs just makes them messy so i don't like i've tried before adding peacocks to swirly or drippy slip to peacock or anything like that and i tend to think it makes them messy and they work worse you got twice as many processes to make something that looks half as good so i don't like it but again if that's what you wanted maybe i'll feel differently about it when it's fired the technique sort of works it does flow over it so yeah that um hopefully will be a few things to think about if you wanted to play with the technique um it's infinitely variable because obviously you can have as many colors of slip as you want and you can apply them in a bunch of different ways this is just the handful that i thought of or that i've been playing with recently but i don't think i even did a particularly good demonstration of the what i was talking about on the third one where you come back over the top if you get that right you get um this sort of strata to it and you can when it's when you're applying the slip especially if they're colors that are quite obviously different as as pre-flight colors um so some especially if you covered with cobalt for example you won't really be able to see the difference until it's flat but some of them are very obvious as they come out you can actually see how crisp the lines can be when they come out um and i still haven't figured out exactly why it is sometimes that works perfectly and sometimes it doesn't i think it's to do with how marbled they are in the syringe and then how you apply them so it's sort of a balancing act between those and you need to to see what's happening and adjust as you go but there's a lot of variables and there's a lot you could learn about it and i'm not really experimenting with it that much i've done a lot of one design of it but you could kind of keep going and finding new combinations and new techniques and i think this is just scratching the surface so hopefully this gives you an idea for something you can try that's different and you can build on this and try something different again because um yeah there's a lot of potential to it and i look forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with you

Channel: Old Forge Creations

Views: 39,138

Keywords: pottery, clay, potterylove, potterylife, kilnfolk, ceramic, ceramics, contemporaryceramics, handmade, handmadepottery, createmakeshare, glaze, cone6, wheelthrown, wheelthrowing, potteryvideo, satisfyingvideo, oddlysatisfying, satisfying, oldforgecreations

Id: 855iQalJzPY

Length: 28min 20sec (1700 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/OldForgeCreations]

It's the same basic process and slip for each, but I've found small differences in the application can make a big difference in the end result.

If you just want to see the results then they're all here and the examples of the coloured versions of the applications I've been experimenting with recently are here

[u/ButtonOfButton]

Very cool!