Ancient Jasper
Amaco Potter's Choice
The loudest demonstration of breaking we own. Deep red where it is thick, gold wherever an edge cuts through it, and it needs no help from you beyond a carved line.
Every glaze on our shelves that rewards a carved, thrown or textured surface rather than hiding it.
There is one property that separates a glaze which flatters a carved pot from one that fills it in, and it is called breaking. A breaking glaze thins on every raised edge and pools in every low spot, so the same glaze reads as two colors: light on the high points and dark in the lines.
The opposite is an opaque, even glaze. Those have their place, and the flat clean colors on our shelves are genuinely useful, but they will bury a texture you spent an hour carving.
Every glaze on this page is marked good on texture in our own records, which means we have looked at it on a real fired test tile rather than trusting the label. The list runs long because a lot of the shelf qualifies, so it is grouped by maker.
Two practical notes. Breaking is a thickness effect, so the same glaze can break beautifully in one place and not at all where you laid it on thick. And carving deeper does not always help; a crisp shallow line often reads better than a deep one, because a deep one just fills with glaze.
212 is a lot to look at. If you want three, these are the three.
Amaco Potter's Choice
The loudest demonstration of breaking we own. Deep red where it is thick, gold wherever an edge cuts through it, and it needs no help from you beyond a carved line.
Amaco Celadon
The quiet version of the same idea. A celadon that pools three shades darker in a line and nearly vanishes on a rim.
Amaco Potter's Choice
Built specifically for this job by Amaco, which is why it does it so plainly. Worth firing once just to calibrate your eye.
Grouped by maker. Every tile is one we fired ourselves.
Potter's Choice and the celadons are the two ranges built most deliberately around breaking. If you carve regularly, start here.
Coyote's reactive lines break hard and unpredictably, which is the appeal. Their Gloss glazes underneath give the reactive ones something to work against.
The Floating series breaks by design, since one color sitting over another is the entire premise of the line.

The mistake almost everyone makes on their first carved pot is going too deep. A deep line fills right up with glaze and fires as a flat dark stripe, because there is no thin edge left anywhere for the glaze to break over.
What you actually want is a crisp edge and a shallow floor. Two millimetres, cut cleanly with a loop tool while the clay is leather hard, gives the glaze a sharp rim to thin out on and a shallow pool to gather in. That contrast is the whole effect, and it costs you less carving rather than more.
If your carved pot came out flatter than the test tile, the depth was almost certainly the problem before the glaze was.

Throwing rings left deliberately rather than smoothed away. A chattered surface from a flexible rib at leather hard. A stamped or rouletted band. A torn edge. The seam where two slabs met. Faceting cut with a wire. Sgraffito through a coat of underglaze.
Every one of those gives a breaking glaze somewhere to work, and most of them cost nothing but the decision to stop smoothing. The fastest improvement available to most potters is not a better glaze; it is leaving the surface alone.

A celadon is a transparent glaze with a trace of iron in it, which means it has almost nothing to hide behind. Where it sits thin it nearly vanishes and the clay reads straight through; where it pools it goes several shades darker. That is the purest possible version of breaking, and it is why celadon has survived a thousand years of fashion.
The reactive glazes on this page break harder and louder. The celadons break more honestly. If you want somebody to see the work you did rather than the glaze you chose, start there.

A flat test tile tells you the color and nothing else. The tiles on these pages are made with our raised logo precisely so you can see what a glaze does over an edge, but your carving is not our logo.
If a piece matters, carve a scrap of the same clay with the same tool at the same depth, glaze it the same way, and fire it. Ten minutes of that has saved more good pots than any amount of reading, including this.
The glaze thins on raised edges and pools in recesses, so one glaze reads as two colors.
Often shallower than you think. A deep line fills with glaze and loses the contrast a crisp shallow one keeps.
Yes, they just have less to do. You get the color without the second color.
Because it does not break. Flat opaque glazes are excellent for other things and would bury your carving.
More than anything else. Breaking happens where the glaze is thin, so a heavy coat can erase the effect entirely.
From our own fired test tiles, not from the makers' labels.
If you spent the time carving it, spend a minute picking the glaze. The wrong one is not a bad glaze, it is just one that fills in your work.
We have done our best to represent every glaze here accurately, and you should still expect your pot to look different from what is on this screen.
Our glaze tile images are digitally created. They are built to show the character of a glaze, not to be a color match.
A screen is not a printout, a printout is not a test tile, and a test tile is not a finished pot. Each step in that chain shifts what a glaze looks like, sometimes a lot.
On top of that, the pottery itself changes the result: the clay body, how thick the glaze went on, whether it was brushed, dipped or sprayed, what was layered under or over it, where the piece sat in the kiln, how hot that spot ran, how fast it cooled, what was fired next to it, and how much texture the surface had. Two pots glazed from the same jar on the same day can come out different.
Treat every image here as a starting point, and treat a test tile fired on your own clay as the real answer.