Technique guide
Glazing big and complicated pottery, faster
Large pieces and heavily detailed pieces punish slow glazing. Not because they are harder to glaze. Because they put you on a clock that a mug never does.
Below is the order of operations that fixes it, broken into short lists you can keep open on your phone while your hands are wet, plus fifteen videos from potters who do this well and let you watch it happen in real time.
Below is the order of operations that fixes it, short enough to keep open on your phone while your hands are wet, with two videos from potters who let you watch it happen in real time.
Jump to a section
The short version
Big pieces run out of time, not skill
Glaze sticks because dry bisque pulls the water out of it. A pot can only drink so much, and something big reaches that limit in about ninety seconds. After that the glaze stops grabbing and starts sliding, and the coat goes on thin and blotchy no matter how much you put on.
The outside wall of a sixteen inch vase is around nine times the surface of a mug, and past eighteen times once you count the inside. Same clock, nine times the ground to cover. That is the entire difficulty, and the fix is order rather than skill.
Which method, in one question
- Does the whole piece fit under the glaze? Dip it. One dip, counted out loud, three seconds to start. In and out at an angle, one shake over the bucket, then set it down and leave it alone. Too tall to go under in one move: dip the first half well past the middle, wait for matte, flip, and dip the second half so it stops short of the first line.
- Too big to fit, but hollow? Pour it. Inside: about a quarter of the volume in, tip and roll twice, invert and drain it completely, then wipe the rim and any outside drips right away. Outside: on a banding wheel sitting in a catch tub, spinning slowly, pouring from the top and working down in overlapping passes.
- Carved, textured or sculptural? Brush it, thin. Color into the recesses first, wipe the high points back with a barely damp sponge, then one thin coat over the top. Every extra coat is another layer of glass sitting over the detail you spent the most time on.
The rule under all three
Inside first, always. Then wait until the outside looks and feels like dry bisque again before you touch it. That wait is the step everybody skips, and skipping it is what makes a big piece come out patchy. Do not add wet glaze to a wet spot to fix a thin patch either. Let it dry, then feather it in with a brush.
And stop finishing one piece at a time. Wax every foot, then pour every interior, then do every exterior grouped by glaze, then all the touch-ups in one lap, then one cleanup. Nothing is finished for most of the session, which feels wrong, and every drying wait gets filled with the next pass. That is where the hour was hiding.
Watch it happen
How I Glaze a Tall Vase
The two-part dip in about sixty seconds. This is the dipping answer above, done by somebody who does it every week.
103. Using Pouring Technique to Glaze a Vase / Bottle With Hsin-Chuen Lin
The cleanest demonstration of the inside pour and the roll anywhere online. Watch the wrists, not the glaze.
Why this page is built this way
Reading it and watching it are doing two different jobs
You cannot learn a hand skill from a paragraph. Nobody has ever read a sentence about wrist angle and then had a good wrist angle. Watching someone glaze a big vase gives you the things words are terrible at: how fast the hand actually moves, how much glaze comes off a rim, what “too thick” looks like in the two seconds before it starts to sag, how calm the whole thing is supposed to be.
And you cannot follow a video with glaze on your hands. That is the other half. Nobody is scrubbing back to 6:42 with a wet piece balanced on a banding wheel. Video is bad at order, bad at numbers, and bad at the one step you forgot.
So they do different jobs. Words carry the sequence. Video carries the feel.
There is real research behind this, and it is not complicated. People remember more when information arrives through two channels instead of one, because the words and the pictures get stored separately and each one gives you a second way back to the same idea. Watch it once and you know what it should look like. Read it once and you know what order to do it in. Do both and you can actually repeat it next week, which is the only version of learning that counts.
How to use this page
Read a section. Watch the video in that section, once, all the way through, before you touch anything. Then open the checklist near the bottom on your phone and work off that. Do not try to watch and glaze at the same time. That is how a piece sits half-glazed on a table for eleven minutes while you rewind.
The thing nobody tells you
A big piece is not harder. It is faster.
Glaze sticks to bisque because the pot pulls the water out of it. That is the whole mechanism. The clay drinks, the glaze layer stiffens, and it stays where you put it.
Which means every bisque piece has a limit. It can only drink so much before it is full. On a mug you will never find that limit. On something big you will find it in about ninety seconds, and once you find it the glaze stops grabbing and starts sliding. It goes on thin. It blotches. It crawls. It refuses to dry between coats, so your second coat lifts your first coat, and now you are standing there with a ruined surface and no way to undo it.
That is why big pieces feel hard. It is not skill. It is that you have more surface to cover and less time to cover it, and most people are working in the wrong order.
Drawn to scale, and that is the point
- The outside wall of a 16 inch tall, 8 inch wide vase, unrolled flat. Around 400 square inches.
- The outside wall of an ordinary mug, unrolled flat at the same scale. Around 44 square inches.
- Everything else. The vase is a little over nine times the mug, and that is only the outside. Add the inside and you are past eighteen.
Both rectangles are the real circumference multiplied by the real height, at one shared scale. Nothing here is stylized.
Four things change once a piece gets big
The clock starts
You have one pass at a saturated surface, and you do not get to decide when saturation happens. Plan the whole piece before the first drop lands.
It gets heavy and slippery
Wet glaze adds real weight, and a glazed surface has no grip at all. Every handoff is a chance to drop something you spent six hours making.
Gravity gets a vote
More vertical wall means more glaze wanting to move down it. A glaze that behaves on a bowl can run off a tall form and weld it to the shelf.
You cannot reach the middle
Big flat surfaces have a center your brush cannot get to without leaning over the wet part. Method matters more than it did before.
Step one
Ten minutes of setup buys you back an hour
Almost every big-piece disaster is a setup problem wearing a technique costume. You reached for something. You had to walk away. You put a wet piece down on a dry surface. Fix all of that before you open a single glaze.
Tapping a line just checks it off on this screen. Nothing is saved, so a refresh gives you a clean list.
Step two
Pick the method before you pick up the glaze
There are three ways to get glaze onto a big piece and only one of them is right for what you made. Tap what you are holding.
Tall vase or bottle
Nothing beats pouring for the inside of a tall form, because your hand is never going in there and a brush cannot reach the shoulder. Pour, roll it twice, dump it out.
For the outside, dip if it fits. If it does not fit, dip it in two halves and let the overlap land somewhere you do not mind seeing it. If it will not fit in anything, pour the outside on a banding wheel over a catch tub.
Wide bowl or platter
The inside is the whole piece on a wide low form, and it is also the hardest thing to keep even. Pouring the inside pools glaze in the middle, which fires thick, bubbles and pinholes. So dip it if you have anything wide enough, using first side in, first side out so both edges get the same seconds.
If it is too wide for any container, brush the inside with the biggest soft brush you own, working in overlapping bands from the center out, and keep a wet edge the whole way.
Sculpture or figure
Sculptural work has undercuts, thin projections and no good place to hold it, which rules out dipping and makes pouring a mess. Brush it, and brush it thin, and plan your grip before you start. Work in sections, hold by a section you have not glazed yet, and let each section set before you turn it.
Anything with a flat underside that will sit on the shelf gets waxed early. Anything that hangs out over the base gets a catcher under it.
Carved or textured
Every coat of glaze is another layer of blur over the thing you spent the most time on. The rule flips here: you want the thinnest coverage that still fires properly, not the most even one.
The reliable method is to get color down into the recesses, wipe it back off the high points, then a single thin coat over the top so the texture reads as light and shadow instead of disappearing.
Handles, lids and spouts
Attachments are where glaze pools, where fingers land, and where you find out you had no plan. Do the awkward part first while the rest of the piece is dry and grippable, then let it set, then do the body.
Inside a handle joint and under a spout, glaze will collect and run. Take a dry brush or a puff of air to those spots the moment they stop looking wet. Lid galleries and the rim they sit on get wax, every time, no exceptions, or the lid fires shut.
Two videos worth watching before any of the rest
Neither one is about big work specifically. Both are about doing the whole process deliberately instead of hurrying, which is the actual skill underneath everything below.
Glazing Basics / full length video / free to watch
A full length, start to finish walkthrough. If you only watch one thing on this page, watch this, because it sets the baseline everything else is a variation on.
My Advice on How to Glaze Pottery
Glazing treated as an active, decision-heavy stage rather than a dunk at the end. Watch how much of his time goes to tidying up afterward, and how deliberate the handling is.
Method one
Dipping something big
Dipping is the fastest even coat there is. One dip, three seconds, done. The trouble is only ever that the piece does not fit, and the answer to that is halves, not panic.
Inside first. Always inside first.
Pour glaze in, roll it around twice, dump it out. If you dip the outside first, you soak the wall from the outside in, and by the time you get to the inside the clay is full and will not take it.
Let the inside stiffen before the outside
Matte, not wet. On a big piece this is a real wait, and it is the wait everyone skips. Use it to wax feet, stir the next glaze, or start the next piece.
If it fits, one dip beats two
One dip gives you zero overlap lines. Two dips give you one. Nothing gives you fewer than zero, so if the whole thing goes under, put the whole thing under.
If it does not fit, dip in halves and go deep first
Dip the first half well past the middle. Let it dry to matte. Then flip and dip the second half so it stops short of the first line, leaving a thin overlap band rather than a thick one. Put that band where you want it, not where it lands. On a lot of glazes the overlap is the best-looking stripe on the pot.
Grip it once, and grip it somewhere strong
Tongs on the thickest ring you have, or fingers spread wide with one on the rim and the rest inside. Decide the grip before the piece is wet, and do not adjust mid-dip.
Count out loud, and count the same every time
Three seconds is the usual starting point. The number matters less than the fact that it is a number. If you do not count, you cannot repeat a result you liked or fix one you did not.
In and out like a ladle, not like a cannonball
Enter at an angle so air can leave and glaze can follow. Straight down traps air, splashes, and leaves a bald patch exactly where the bubble was.
One shake, over the bucket, then set it down
One. A second shake throws glaze around the room and does nothing for the pot. Set it on foam or a bat and then leave it alone until it is matte.
Fix the finger marks last, with a brush
Once everything is dry, feather the same glaze into the grip marks with a soft brush. Do not try to fix them while wet. You will make four new ones.
The one that saves the most time
If a form is narrow enough, you can glaze the inside and outside in a single move by dipping it upside down. The trapped air keeps the interior glaze from washing out and the rim comes out cleaner than you could ever brush it. It does not work on everything. When it does work it saves you the entire drying wait between steps.
Watch it happen
How I Glaze a Tall Vase
The two-part dip in about sixty seconds, including why he does the outside first with this particular glaze. Short, and exactly the technique described above.
Double Dippin! How to Glaze the Inside and Outside of a Pot in One Fell Swoop | SAM SCOTT
The trapped-air trick from the callout above, demonstrated. Worth knowing even if half your work is too wide for it.
Try these glazing methods: dipping with hands, with tongs and by brush
The same pot, three ways, back to back. This is the fastest way to understand what tongs actually buy you and what they cost you.
Method two
Pouring, inside and out
Pouring is the only method that does not care how big the piece is. It is also the fastest way to cover a large surface, and the only sensible way to reach the inside of anything with a neck.
The inside pour, which you should be doing on every hollow form
Fill the pitcher fuller than you think you need
Running out halfway through a roll is how you get a hard tide line inside a pot you will never be able to reach again.
Pour in about a quarter of the volume
You are not filling it. You are giving yourself enough to keep moving across the whole inside wall.
Tip and roll, two full revolutions
Keep the glaze climbing to the shoulder and the neck. Two turns. Smooth. This is the whole skill and it takes about four seconds. Dipping glaze in particular wants to be quick, because it grabs in a couple of seconds and a slow swish leaves a coat thick enough to crawl.
Invert and drain it completely, rotating as it goes
Any glaze left pooling in the bottom fires thick, and thick pools bubble and pinhole. Turn the piece as it empties so nothing sits in one place.
Wipe the rim and the outside immediately
Glaze that ran down the outside will absolutely show up as a streak under your exterior glaze. Damp sponge, one pass, right now, while it wipes off instead of scrubbing off.
Expect the outside to go dark and damp
Water is moving out through the wall. That is the clock we talked about, and it is why the outside waits until the piece looks dry again.
The outside pour, on a banding wheel
This is what you do when nothing you own is big enough to dip into. You need a container underneath wide enough to catch what runs off, and you need to be able to spin the piece without touching it.
Set the piece on a banding wheel sitting inside a catch tub
If the piece is wider than the wheel head, put it on two equal blocks of wood so the glaze can leave the bottom edge instead of building a ridge there.
Runny glaze goes on upside down
Inverted, the heavy build-up ends up near the rim, which in the fire is the top. Right side up, the build-up is at the foot, which is exactly where a runner will find your kiln shelf.
Spin slowly and pour from the top
Let the glaze sheet down on its own. Two full revolutions at the top before you move the stream any lower.
Work down in overlapping passes
Each new band overlaps the one above by roughly a finger width. Keep going until the whole exterior is covered, and keep the wheel turning the whole time.
Do not chase misses while it is wet
You will see a thin spot and want to pour more on it. Do not. Adding wet glaze to wet glaze on a saturated wall is how you get a slide. Let it dry and patch it with a brush.
Leave it on the wheel until it is dry
Moving a big piece with wet glaze on it means handling a slippery, heavy, freshly coated object. Wait. Go do something else.
Watch it happen
103. Using Pouring Technique to Glaze a Vase / Bottle With Hsin-Chuen Lin
The cleanest demonstration of the inside pour and the roll anywhere online. Watch the wrists, not the glaze.
SIMON LEACH POTTERY - Pouring glaze over larger forms
Big forms, poured, by somebody who has done it ten thousand times. Note how little he fusses and how few passes it takes.
Glazing a TALL vessel | MAE CERAMICS
A piece that flatly does not fit in the bucket, solved by pouring, in a normal studio rather than a production one. The most relatable video here.
Pottery Glazing Techniques! Drips, Pouring, and More!
Three pouring variations in one video, including using the pour itself as the decoration instead of trying to hide it.
Method three
Brushing a large surface without losing your mind
Brushing gets a bad reputation on big work because most people brush big work exactly the way they brush a mug, which is with a brush that is far too small and a technique built for a surface that dries slowly.
- Use the widest soft brush you can control. A fan or a hake brush covers ground three or four times faster than a round brush, and often gets there in fewer coats because it lays a thicker, more even film.
- Load heavy, unload on the pot. Wiping the brush on the rim of the cup takes off the glaze you are about to need. A dry brush drags, and dragging is what makes bald streaks.
- Work in bands, not patches. Go all the way around the piece in one continuous band, then drop down and do the next one. Patches leave hard edges where each patch dried before it met the next.
- Keep a wet edge. Always start the next stroke into the wet edge of the last one. On a big piece your first stroke can be dry by the time you come back around, which is the whole difficulty in one sentence.
- Let the banding wheel do the moving. Hold the brush still and turn the piece. Your hand is far less steady than a wheel is, and you get a true horizontal band instead of a wobble.
- Cross your coats. Coat one goes one direction, coat two goes across it, and a third goes diagonally if the glaze is thin. Crossed coats hide brush marks and even out thickness without more glaze.
- Wait for matte, not for dry. Between coats the surface should have lost its shine and nothing more. Bone dry between coats on a big piece takes forever, and putting a wet coat on a still-shiny one lifts it.
- Do not go back to fix a stroke. The stroke is already setting. Touching it pulls glaze off and leaves a thin line right where you were trying to help.
The number of coats is not a style choice
Brushing glazes are formulated to be applied at a specific thickness, and thin is the failure mode nobody notices until it comes out of the kiln looking washed out and dry. A wide fan or hake brush will often get there in two coats. Almost every other brush needs three. If in doubt, check the jar, and when you go up in scale do not go down in coats because you are tired.
Watch it happen
How to Glaze Pottery! Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
Brush loading, coat count and the tidy-up, demonstrated slowly enough to copy. The brush handling here is what most people are getting wrong on big surfaces.
The hard one
Carved, textured and intricate work
Here is the uncomfortable part. Glaze is a liquid that turns into glass, and glass fills things in. Every coat you add is another layer of blur over the detail you spent the most time on.
So the instinct that serves you well everywhere else, which is to get good even coverage, is the instinct that flattens a carved piece. On detailed work you want the thinnest application that still fires correctly, and you want the glaze to be uneven on purpose: thin on the high points, pooled in the low ones. That contrast is the entire reason to carve something.
The method that works on almost anything
Get color down into the recesses first
Underglaze or an oxide wash, brushed on generously and worked into every cut with the tip of the brush. Do not be tidy about this stage. You are about to remove most of it.
Wipe the high points back
A barely damp sponge, rinsed constantly, taken lightly across the surface. The color stays in the low spots and leaves the raised ones. This is the step that makes carving read from across a room.
Then one thin coat over the top
Usually a clear or a light-breaking glaze. One thin coat. Two if the glaze demands it. Not three, and never a thick one, because that is where the carving goes to die.
Brush into the texture, then blot
Push glaze into a deep cut and it will bridge across the opening rather than lining it. Work the brush into the cut, then blot the bridge out with a dry brush corner or a puff of air before it sets.
Check every recess for a pool before it dries
Glaze collects at the bottom of a carve, in a handle joint, under a spout, in the belly of a fold. A little pooling looks great. A lot of pooling bubbles, pinholes, or runs. Look at the piece from underneath and from the side, not just from where you are standing.
Break glazes do half of this work for you
Some glazes go thin and pale wherever they sit over an edge and dark wherever they collect. Those are called break glazes, and on a carved surface they draw the pattern for you with no wiping back at all. If you have one, test it on a scrap tile carved the same way as your piece before you commit to a big one. The same glaze over a different depth of cut is a different glaze.
One question to ask your studio before you carve anything
Studios differ on when underglaze is allowed to go on, and it changes your whole plan. If your studio only allows underglaze on raw clay, then all of the recess coloring above has to happen before the bisque fire, not after. Ask before you make the piece, not after. Ours works that way, and it is explained further down.
Watch it happen
Glazing for Texture
Stain in, wipe back, glaze over. The three-step method above, demonstrated end to end on a textured surface.
How to Glaze Textured Pottery | My Favorite Techniques & Glazes
Which glazes actually flatter texture and which ones bury it. The glaze choice matters more here than the application does.
Glazing Carved Pottery - Kiln Unload
The only video here that shows you the glazing and then the fired result of that exact glazing. That pairing is worth more than any amount of theory.
The real shortcut
Wax resist is the fastest thing on this page
Cleaning glaze off the bottom of a big piece is miserable. You are holding something heavy at an angle, scraping at a foot ring with a sponge, and getting it almost right. Wax resist deletes that job entirely.
You brush it on before you glaze, glaze right over the top of it, and the glaze simply refuses to stay where the wax is. Wipe once with a damp sponge and the foot is clean and the line is sharp. Thirty seconds of work up front, ten minutes saved at the end, on every single piece.
- Wax the bottom face and a little way up the wall. Somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of an inch is standard, and a quarter for any glaze that moves in the fire.
- Wax lid galleries and the rims they sit on. Every time. A lid that fuses to its jar is not a fixable problem, it is a broken pot.
- Look across the light to find the misses. Wax dries nearly invisible from directly above. Turn the piece toward a light and look at the sheen at a low angle.
- Let it dry fully before it meets glaze. Minutes on bisque. Hours if you have waxed on top of a dried glaze layer to make a pattern. Rushing this smears wax into places you wanted glaze.
- Beads on the wax get wiped, not scrubbed. A barely damp sponge, one light pass. Scrubbing pushes glaze past the wax line and ruins the edge you waxed to get.
- Wax over a first glaze to make patterns. Dip once, let it dry, brush wax where you want that color to stay, dip again. The second glaze only lands where the wax is not, and you have a hard-edged two-glaze design with no masking tape and no steady hand required.
- Do not put a waxed brush in the water bucket. Keep one brush for wax, wash it in warm soapy water the second you are done, and never let it dry with wax in it. Wax ends brushes.
- Do not wax somewhere you wanted glaze. You cannot wipe it off and you cannot sand it off. It has to be burned off in a firing before glaze will stick there. Slow down for the ten seconds it takes to be sure.
Watch it happen
How to use Wax resist 101 part 1 (clean bottoms)
The basic job, done properly, in a few minutes. Start here if you have never touched wax.
Wax Resist with Dipping and Layering
Wax as a design tool rather than a cleanup tool. This is the technique that makes a big plain form look considered without adding an hour of brushwork.
The expensive mistake
Runs, cookies, and not welding your pot to a shelf
A glaze that runs a quarter inch on a mug has a quarter inch of wall to do it on. On a sixteen inch vase it has sixteen, and gravity has been pulling on it the entire firing.
This is the one place where a big piece is not just slower to get wrong, it is more expensive. A run takes out your piece and the kiln shelf underneath it, and shelves are not cheap. Every studio has a story about it and none of the stories are funny.
- Wax the foot before you open a single glaze. Thirty seconds up front, and the whole job of cleaning glaze off a heavy bottom disappears. One damp wipe at the end and the line is sharp.
- Zero glaze on the bottom face. Not a thin coat. Not almost none. Zero.
- Stop the glaze short of the table. An eighth of an inch for a glaze you know is stable. A quarter for anything that moves, and a full quarter on anything tall.
- Put a cookie or a catcher under anything you are unsure about. A cookie is a flat disc of scrap clay, thin like a chubby tortilla, wider than the piece by about three quarters of an inch all the way around. It catches the run so the shelf does not.
- Thick glaze runs more than thin glaze. Big pieces tempt you into thick, because coverage looks patchy while it is wet and looks fine once it is fired. Trust the coat count, not your eyes.
- Do not stack runners on top of each other. Two glazes that each move a little will move a lot together. Layer them up high on the piece, not down low.
- Test the glaze at the height you are actually using it. A test tile is four inches tall lying flat. That tells you very little about the same glaze on a vertical foot of wall. Fire a tall test before you fire a tall piece.
The actual speed unlock
Stop finishing one piece at a time
Everything above makes an individual piece go faster. This is the thing that makes a whole glaze day go faster, and almost nobody does it.
Most people glaze a piece completely, clean up, and start the next one. Which means you wax once per piece, wash your hands once per piece, open and close the same glaze four times, and spend every drying wait standing there watching a pot dry. A shop does not work that way. A shop works in passes.
Pass one: wax every foot
All of them, one after another, one brush, one cleanup. Then let the whole table dry while you do the next pass.
Pass two: every interior
Pour or dip every inside, biggest piece first. Biggest first matters, because the biggest is the one that takes longest to come back to dry, so it should get the head start.
Pass three: exteriors, grouped by glaze
Not grouped by piece. Every piece getting the same glaze goes through together, then you move to the next glaze. Every cup you pour is a cup you have to deal with afterward, so pour as few as possible.
Pass four: lightest glazes to darkest
Within the exterior pass, work light to dark. A speck of dark glaze in a light one shows. The reverse mostly does not, and you save a hand wash and a rinse between every single change.
Pass five: all touch-ups at once
Everything is dry by now. Walk the table with one brush and fix every finger mark, thin spot and drip in a single lap.
Pass six: clean the feet, then clean the space
One wipe of every waxed foot, then one cleanup of the whole area. You just did in one cleanup what most people do six times.
Why this feels wrong and works anyway
Working in passes means nothing is finished for most of the session, and that is uncomfortable. You are used to seeing a done pot. What you get instead is every drying wait already filled with the next pass, which is where the time actually was the whole time. It was never the glazing. It was the standing around.
The part nobody warns you about
At some point the bottleneck stops being your hands
Here is an honest thing about community studios, ours included. They are equipped for what most members make, which is mugs, bowls, plates and the occasional vase. The buckets are sized for that. The tubs are sized for that. The tables are sized for that.
That is not a criticism of anybody. It is arithmetic. A shared studio buys the gear that serves the most people, and a catch tub wide enough for a twenty inch platter serves about four of them.
So once you start making big or complicated work regularly, the honest answer is that some of the equipment needs to be yours. Not because the studio is failing you. Because you have walked past the middle of the bell curve and the gear out here is specific to what you are doing.
The good news is that almost none of it is expensive, and half of it is not really equipment so much as a container you went and found.
Worth buying or building, roughly in order of how much it changes your day
- A catch tub wider than your widest piece. This is the single biggest one, because it is what unlocks the banding-wheel exterior pour on anything that will not fit in a bucket. A cement mixing tray, a shallow under-bed storage tub, a plastic kiddie pool for platters. Cheap, and it turns an impossible piece into a two minute job.
- A container deep enough for your tallest form. A tall kitchen bin, a food-grade bucket, a length of wide pipe with a cap glued on the end. Anything that lets a tall piece go all the way under in one move rather than two, because one dip has no overlap line.
- Your own bottles of the glazes you use most. A glaze you own is a glaze you can pour, swish and pour back without asking anyone. On big work that is the difference between an interior you can reach and an interior you cannot.
- Two blocks of wood, or a small stilted rack. The cheapest thing on this list and one of the most useful. It lifts a wide piece off the wheel head so poured glaze can leave the bottom edge instead of building a ridge there.
- A wide soft brush that is actually yours. A good hake or a big fan brush, kept clean, kept for glaze only. Shared brushes get worn down and splayed, and a splayed brush is why your bands have streaks in them.
- Glazing tongs sized for your work. Studio tongs are sized for studio-sized pots. If you are dipping something with a thick rim or an unusual profile, a pair that actually fits it is worth having.
- Your own banding wheel or a heavy lazy susan. Nice to have rather than essential, but if you glaze big work often you will get tired of waiting for the good one.
- A spray setup is the one thing not to buy for this. Spraying is genuinely excellent on large work, and it is also the one method that needs a booth, a compressor and ventilation you are not going to improvise safely. Leave that one alone unless you are building a whole studio.
Start with two of them
If you buy nothing else, buy a catch tub wider than your widest piece and a container deep enough for your tallest one. Those two cover the exterior pour and the single dip, which between them handle almost every big form there is. Everything else on the list is a comfort. Those two are a capability.
If you glaze with us
How all of this works at The Clay Hole
Everything above is true anywhere. This part is only true here, and some of it overrides what you just watched, because every studio is set up differently and ours has rules that exist for good reasons.
We do not spray. At all.
No booth, no gun, no exceptions. If a video shows you a beautiful sprayed gradient on a big form, admire it and then pick a different method. Dip, pour or brush.
You can pour and swish bucket glaze now
This changed. Pour dipping glaze into a hollow form, swish it around, tip it back into the bucket. Just be quick about it. Dipping glaze builds far faster than brush-on does, and a slow swish gives you a coat thick enough to crawl or run.
Yes, there is a bucket deep enough
A tall vase will go in. That is on purpose. Grab the glazing tongs, get your grip sorted before you are holding something wet, and dip it in halves if it is too tall to go under in one move.
Pouring brush-on means your own bottles
Our brush-on glazes do not get poured. If you want to pour a brush-on glaze, buy your own bottles of it. It has to be a glaze we already carry, so we know how it behaves in our kilns and so nobody has to guess what is on your kiln ticket.
Bring your own gear, take it home
We do not have a giant catch tub, and honestly most community studios do not. Bring your own tub, your own tall dipping container, whatever the work needs. It just goes home with you at the end of the visit rather than living here.
What is here for you to use
- Banding wheels. Use one for anything big. Turning the piece instead of walking around it is most of this page.
- Glazing tongs. For dipping anything you cannot get a confident hand grip on.
- Wax resist. Please use it. It is the difference between a clean foot and twenty minutes with a sponge.
- Pitchers, ladles and cups. For pouring and swishing dipping glaze through a hollow form, which is the fastest interior on a big piece.
- Compressed air. Excellent for blowing a bridged film out of a deep carve or a handle joint before it sets.
- Foam pads and bats. Set wet work down on these, never straight onto the table, and never drag anything.
- Heat guns. High setting, and heat the table, never the mats. A warm table under a big piece cuts the drying wait between coats dramatically.
- More than 650 brush-on glazes and seven dipping buckets. Plus over 150 underglazes. If you are trying to work out which one moves in the fire, that is what the glaze finder is for.
The rules that change what you just watched
- Underglaze goes on raw clay, before the bisque fire. Leather-hard or bone-dry, and Speedball or Amaco Velvet only. So the recess-coloring step from the carving section happens before your piece is ever bisqued. Plan the decoration when you plan the carving, not on glaze day.
- Stir, do not shake. Stroke & Coat is the one family that is fine to shake. Everything else gets stirred until smooth and then about thirty seconds more, and the crust on the jar wall gets scraped back in.
- Cups, not jars, for our brush-on glazes. Never dip a brush into a studio jar. Spoon what you need into the smallest cup that will do the job. Single-glaze leftovers pour back in. Anything you mixed goes in the trash.
- Pouring a brush-on glaze means pouring your own. Buy your own bottles of it and it is yours to pour, swish and pour back as much as you like. It has to be a glaze we already carry. Ours stay in the jar and go out by the spoonful.
- Dipping glaze can be poured, but quickly. Pour it through a hollow form, swish, tip it back into its bucket. Dipping glaze grabs in a couple of seconds, so a slow swish is how you end up with a coat thick enough to crawl, bubble or run.
- Your own equipment goes home with you. Tubs, tall dipping containers, a wider banding wheel, whatever you bring is welcome. It just does not get stored here at the end of the visit.
- No water added to any glaze without an instructor. A thin glaze fires badly and you cannot tell by looking at it wet.
- Coats: x2 with a fan or hake brush, at least x3 with anything else. Going up in scale is not a reason to go down in coats.
- Zero glaze on the bottom face. Stop an eighth of an inch above the table for a stable glaze, a quarter for a runner. On tall work, always the quarter.
- Make a kiln cookie, or buy one. Scrap clay, rolled thin like a chubby tortilla, about three quarters of an inch wider all around than whatever touches the shelf. Pre-made cookies and glaze catchers are in the studio shop if you would rather not make one.
- Fill out the kiln ticket properly. Name, date, clay body, and every glaze you used. On a big piece the glaze list matters more, not less, because there is more of it to go wrong.
Our firing, in two numbers
Bisque goes to cone 05. Glaze goes to cone 5½, which lands between cone 5 and cone 6. Every glaze in the building is chosen to behave at that. It also means a run here behaves the way it behaves here, so test tiles fired with us are the only test tiles that tell you anything about us.
The video every member is supposed to watch
None of the videos on this page are ours. The required glazing walkthrough for members, the one that covers our jars, our cups, our brushes and our cleanup, lives on the glaze brushing techniques guide. Watch that one first. This page is what you read after it, once you start making things that do not fit in a bucket.
Take this with you
The whole page on one screen
Screenshot it, copy it into your notes, or just leave this section open while you work. Everything above, in the order you actually do it.
- Pick the glaze first. Know whether it runs.
- Pick the method and commit. Clear twice the table you think you need, everything inside one arm sweep, piece on a banding wheel or a bat.
- Pick the method and commit. Dip, pour, or brush.
- Clear twice the table you think you need.
- Everything inside one arm sweep. No walking.
- Piece goes on a banding wheel or bat, never the bare table.
- Wax the foot now, before any glaze is open.
- Inside first. Pour it, roll it twice, dump it out. Quickly with dipping glaze.
- Wipe the rim and any outside drips immediately.
- Wait for matte before the outside. Fill the wait with the next piece.
- Outside: one dip if it fits, two halves if it does not, deepest half first.
- Count out loud, the same count every time. In and out at an angle, one shake, then leave it alone.
- Count out loud. Same count every time. Three seconds to start.
- In and out at an angle. One shake. Set it down. Leave it alone.
- Brushing instead: widest soft brush, work in bands, keep a wet edge, cross your coats. Carved work: color into the recesses, wipe the high points back, one thin coat over.
- Brushing instead: widest soft brush, work in bands, keep a wet edge, cross your coats.
- Carved or textured: color into the recesses, wipe the high points back, one thin coat over.
- Never add wet glaze to a wet spot to fix it. Let it dry, then patch.
- Zero glaze on the bottom, stopped an eighth to a quarter inch up, a quarter on anything tall, with a cookie under anything you are unsure about.
- Zero glaze on the bottom. Stop an eighth to a quarter inch up. A quarter on anything tall.
- Cookie or catcher under anything you are unsure about.
- Work in passes across every piece, not one piece at a time.
- Touch-ups all at once, at the end, with one brush.
- One cleanup, not six.
Questions
The ones we get asked most
My big piece came out thin and patchy and I definitely put enough glaze on. What happened?
You almost certainly saturated the wall. Once a bisque piece has taken up all the water it can hold, glaze stops being pulled onto the surface and starts sitting on top of it, which reads as thin, blotchy coverage even though you applied plenty. The fix is the order of operations rather than more glaze: inside first, full drying wait, then outside, and never a second wet coat on a still-damp surface.
How long should I actually wait between the inside and the outside?
Until the outside surface looks and feels like dry bisque again, not merely until the glaze inside stopped shining. On something large that can be a while. A warm surface underneath speeds it up considerably, which is what heat guns are for, and it is the single best use of the time you spend waiting on other pieces.
Can I just do more coats to be safe on something big?
Not on carved or textured work, where extra coats bury the detail you made the piece for. And not near the bottom of a tall form, where extra thickness is what turns a well-behaved glaze into a run. Follow the coat count the glaze asks for, and if you want insurance, put the insurance under the piece as a cookie rather than on it as another layer.
What do I do about the finger marks from holding it?
Leave them alone until everything is bone dry, then feather the same glaze into them with a soft brush and let that dry too. Trying to fix a grip mark while the surrounding glaze is still wet reliably produces three more of them. Tongs reduce the problem to two small points instead of five fingers, which is easier to patch cleanly.
Is pouring worse than dipping, quality-wise?
It is less even, and on a small piece that is a real downside. On a large piece it stops mattering, partly because a big surface hides small variation and partly because the alternative is often no method at all. For the inside of a tall form, pouring is not the compromise. It is the only sensible way to do it.
My glaze ran and stuck to the shelf. Can the piece be saved?
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on how much glaze pooled and where. Ask an instructor before you try anything yourself, because the wrong approach turns a repairable foot into a broken pot. The far better plan is the one on this page: stop the glaze higher up the wall than feels necessary, and put a cookie or a catcher underneath anything you have not fired before.
Do I need to test every glaze on a tall tile before using it on a big piece?
For anything you have not seen fired vertically, yes, and it is worth the wait. A flat four inch test tile tells you the color and the surface. It tells you very little about what a foot of vertical wall does to the same glaze under gravity for several hours at temperature.
Do I really need to buy my own equipment for this?
Not for most of it. Dipping, brushing and the interior pour all work with what a shared studio already has. What a shared studio usually does not have is a catch tub wide enough for a big platter or a container deep enough for a tall vase, because those serve very few members and take up a lot of room. Those two are worth owning once you make that kind of work regularly, and neither one has to be expensive or even purpose-built.
The videos here show techniques my studio does not allow. Which do I follow?
Your studio, every time. The videos are from potters working in their own spaces with their own equipment, glazes and safety setups, and a technique that is routine in one studio can be against the rules in another for reasons that are not obvious from the outside. Watch them for the hand skills and the order of operations, then apply them inside whatever your studio actually permits.
One last thing
Big pieces are not a different skill. They are a different order.
Almost nobody fails at this because their hands are not good enough. They fail because they started glazing before they decided how, ran out of time on a wall that was already full of water, and then tried to fix a wet surface with more wet glaze.
Decide first. Inside first. Wait properly. Work in passes. Wax the foot. That is the whole thing, and it will hold up on a twenty inch vase just as well as it does on a mug.
That is the short version. The long one is up at the top of the page behind the switch: all three methods broken into steps, fifteen videos, the carving and wax sections, and the reasoning under every rule here.
Every video on this page belongs to the potter who made it, and none of them were made by us. Videos load only when you press play, so no player and no tracking cookies arrive until you ask for them. Thank you to good elephant pottery, Florian Gadsby, Ceramic Arts Network, Gaean Gardens by Izabela, Hsinchuen Lin, Simon Leach, Mae Ceramics, Jonthepotter, ClayShare, Perrin Pottery, Little Street Pottery, Earth Nation Ceramics and AMACO Brent.
Both videos here belong to the potters who made them, and neither was made by us. They load only when you press play, so no player and no tracking cookies arrive until you ask for them. Thank you to Florian Gadsby and Hsinchuen Lin.
Which version would you like to print?
Videos come out as a labelled box with the title and channel to search for, since paper does not play them.