32 colors, and a kitchen scale.
Mason stains are how you get red clay, a purple slip and a yellow that stays yellow. They are fired pigments, ground to a powder, and they do exactly one job: color. Everything else comes down to weighing the right amount. That is where most batches go wrong. Not talent. Arithmetic.
We sell all 32 by the 25 grams. This page works out how much you need, tells you what it will cost, and teaches you to mix it without wasting any.
Fired pigments, sold by the 25 grams. Pick a color, tell the counter how much clay you are starting with, and it works out the rest.
Six lines, then go buy some.
- A stain is a pigment that has already been fired. It will not change in your kiln the way a raw oxide does. That predictability is what you are paying for.
- Percentages are by dry weight, never by volume. A teaspoon of Best Black holds far more pigment than a teaspoon of Shell Pink. Use a gram scale.
- Clay out of the bag is about twenty two percent water. Weigh eight percent off the wet weight and you have actually used ten and a half. The calculator below takes the water out for you.
- Six percent is the honest first test in a clay body. Blacks and cobalt blues read at three. Pinks, yellows and the inclusion colors need ten to fifteen or they barely show.
- Make a paste with water before it touches anything. Dry powder sprinkled in clumps, and the clumps fire as specks. Do it inside a sealed bag and there is almost no dust.
- Wet clay reads much darker than fired clay. If you like the color while it is wet, it is too dark.
Respirator on for weighing the dry powder. None needed once it is wet. Colored scrap never goes in the communal reclaim, and every stain gets paid for before anybody weighs it out.
Three things decide whether this goes well.
The rest of this page is detail. These three are the spine of it, and almost every wasted batch in a community studio comes from getting one of them wrong.
It is already fired
A stain is metal oxides cooked with ceramic oxides until they react into a single crystal, then ground back to powder. The color is locked in a lattice before you touch it. That is why it does not shift on you the way raw cobalt or copper does, and why you need less of it for the same punch.
It is measured by weight
Every percentage in ceramics is by dry weight. Stains run from about 3.8 to 5.2 in specific gravity, a thirty five percent spread across four ordinary colors, so a scoop of one is emphatically not a scoop of another. A twenty dollar gram scale solves the entire problem.
It has to be tested
A stain is a variable, not a product. The same powder at the same percentage looks different on porcelain than on stoneware, different under a clear than bare, and different again in a glaze carrying zinc. Fire a tile before you commit twenty pounds of clay to a color.
How much do you need, and what does it cost?
Pick a color from the palette below, tell it what you are making and how much clay you are starting with, and it works out the grams, the units to buy and the price. It takes the water out of wet clay for you, which is the correction most people skip.
Pick a color. Enter a weight. Buy that much.
Best Black
Mason 6600Cobalt bearing, which is why it is strong at low percentages. It is also the metal with the lowest exposure limit on any stain sheet, so it is the one to be tidy with.
Paid for first, weighed out second. The owner or the main hand building instructor does the weighing.
Calculate and Order
Change any of these and the quantity on the left updates itself.
- Percentage used, by dry weight3%
- Buy3 units of 25 g
- That costs$4.95
- Which works out at$0.99 a pound
5 lb of wet clay is about 1769 g of actual clay once you take out the water, and 3% of that is 53 g of stain.
Where these percentages come from. Published guidance for coloring a clay body runs anywhere from 1.5 percent to 25 percent depending on who is writing, which is not much help. The numbers here sit in the band that the technical sources and the working potters actually overlap on, adjusted for how strong each color is: blacks and cobalt blues at the bottom, pinks, yellows and the inclusion colors at the top. They are a first test, not a recipe. Fire a tile and move from there.
All 32 of them, in their fired colors.
Tap a color to load it into the counter above. Or add 25 grams straight to the cart if you already know what you want. The price on each card is what 25 grams costs, and it tracks what we paid for the stain, so the expensive ones are expensive here too. Violet is not a typo.
About these photographs. The powder in the jar does not look like this. We edited every one of these toward the color the stain tends to give once it is fired, because a photograph of the raw powder would send you home with the wrong expectation. Even so, treat them as the family rather than the color. What the clay body is, what percentage you use and what goes over the top all move the result.
All 32 stains
- $2.60per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.65per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.65per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.10per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.05per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $0.85per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.10per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.70per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.00per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.50per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.65per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.15per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.10per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $3.80per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.15per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.80per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.35per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $3.50per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.60per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $4.00per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.65per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.05per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $2.45per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $0.85per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.45per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.70per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.10per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $6.85per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.35per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.15per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $0.85per 25 gCalculate & Order
- $1.10per 25 gCalculate & Order
Nothing in that family. Tap Everything to bring the rest back.
Paid for first. Weighed out second. Never the other way round.
This is the one rule on the page with no flexibility in it, and it exists because loose powder in an open studio is both expensive and messy. Nobody scoops their own.
Buy it here first
Pick the color and the number of 25 gram units and pay for it. Your receipt is what tells us how much to weigh out.
Find the owner or the main hand building instructor
Those two weigh mason stains out. Nobody else, and nobody scoops their own. The jars do not live where members can reach them.
It gets weighed on a gram scale, with you there
Which is also the moment to ask anything about how you plan to use it. That conversation is usually worth more than the powder.
Nothing here ships. Mason stains are a studio purchase, collected in person. If you need a full pound of something for a large project, ask the owner and we will bring it in at what it costs us.
A pigment that has already been through a kiln.
Metal oxides get blended with ceramic oxides in a measured ratio, sintered somewhere between 800 and 1400 Celsius until the whole mix reacts into one crystalline compound, then ground back down to a powder about a micron across. By the time it reaches you the color is locked inside a crystal lattice.
That is the entire difference between a stain and a raw oxide. Raw cobalt reacts in your kiln, at the mercy of your glaze chemistry, your schedule and your atmosphere. A stain already did its reacting, under controlled conditions, in someone else's furnace. That is what you are paying for.
Why a stain instead of an oxide
- Colors no raw oxide can make. There is no oxide that gives a bright red, an orange, a clean yellow or a true purple at our firing. Stains are the only route to those.
- The same result twice. Batch to batch consistency is the thing you are paying a premium for.
- Less material. A black stain does at 5 to 10 percent what raw metal oxides need about 15 percent to do.
- Safer to handle. The particles are larger and heavier than raw oxide powders, and the toxic metals are bound into a crystal rather than loose in a jar.
The names are not marketing
Chrome Tin Violet tells you the colorant and the host crystal. So does Iron Cobalt Chromite Black. Once you can read that, the behavior stops being mysterious: the chrome tin family needs calcium, the cobalt family is potent and a little runny, the zircon family is stable and slightly dull.
One family is different from all the others. Inclusion stains, which is what our reds, oranges and the Mango are, are not a colored crystal at all. They are a cadmium pigment physically trapped inside zircon crystals during manufacture, because that cadmium would otherwise be destroyed at our temperature. The shell is the whole trick, and everything you must not do to those colors comes from protecting it. Break the shell and the color is gone. Permanently.
The honest limit. Stains are not inert. They can dissolve, react, bleach or shift depending on the chemistry around them, the temperature and how fast the kiln cools. They are far more predictable than raw oxides. They are not a guarantee.
A teaspoon of one is not a teaspoon of another.
This is the single most useful thing on the page, and it costs twenty dollars to fix permanently. Specific gravities pulled straight off the manufacturer's own safety sheets:
| Stain | Crystal family | Specific gravity |
|---|---|---|
| Shell Pink 6000 | Chrome tin sphene | 3.84 |
| Tin Vanadium Yellow 6404 | Cassiterite | 4.5 |
| Bermuda 6242 | Zircon | 4.8 |
| Best Black 6600 | Iron cobalt chromite spinel | 5.2 |
A thirty five percent density spread across four ordinary stains, and that is before you account for the fact that Best Black works at three percent while Shell Pink needs twelve. Measuring these by the spoon is measuring two things at once and getting both wrong. Buy the scale.
The water problem, which is the expensive one
Every percentage in ceramics is a percentage of dry weight. Clay out of the bag is roughly twenty two percent water, and water is weight that contains no clay. Weigh your stain against the wet weight and you overshoot every time.
| You wanted | Off wet weight you get | Overspend |
|---|---|---|
| 4% | 5.1% | 28% more stain |
| 6% | 7.7% | 28% more stain |
| 8% | 10.3% | 28% more stain |
| 12% | 15.4% | 28% more stain |
Ten pounds of wet clay is 4,536 grams, of which about 3,538 grams is actual clay. Eight percent of the clay is 283 grams. Eight percent of the bag is 363 grams. That is eighty grams of stain you did not need. On Violet that is twenty two dollars.
The counter at the top of this page already does that correction. The shortcut is fine for a first test, because you are going to fire a tile anyway and the difference is one rung on a ladder. It stops being fine the moment you are trying to reproduce a color somebody recorded, scale a master batch, or cost out one of the expensive stains. Then it matters a lot.
How much stain goes into what.
All by dry weight. The counter above applies these for you and adjusts for how strong the particular color is, but it is worth knowing the shape of them.
| What you are making | Usual range | Start here | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clay body | 4 to 8% | 6% | Pastels sit at 1 to 3. Light colors, pinks and yellows need 10 to 15 or they barely read. Past about 10 percent you are buying expense, not color. |
| Slip or engobe | 10 to 15% | 12% | More than clay needs, because there is no glass to dissolve the color into and amplify it. |
| Underglaze | 20 to 40% | 30% | An underglaze is mostly pigment with just enough clay to stick and enough flux to sinter. Commercial ones run higher still. |
| Clear glaze | 5 to 8% | 6% | The tightest agreement of the four. 1 to 3 percent gives a transparent tint instead of an opaque color. |
Which colors need more, and which need almost none
Strong at low percentages
- Blacks. Best Black and Onyx read at 3 to 4 percent in clay.
- Cobalt blues. Mazarine, Teal, Vivid Blue. In a glaze, cobalt is potent at one percent or under.
- Dark greens. Grass Green and Victoria at 5 to 7.
Need a lot before they show
- Yellows. Canary wants 10 to 15 in a clay body.
- Pinks and pale purples. Shell Pink, Alpine Rose, Lavender, Manganese Aluminum Pink. Below 10 percent most pinks give almost nothing.
- Inclusion colors. The reds, Orange, Tangerine and Mango. Most expensive, and they need the most of it.
- White. It is doing the job of an opacifier, so it needs the loading of one.
A body stain is not a glaze stain. Mason designates some of these for clay and slip specifically, and three of ours are on that list: Manganese Aluminum Pink 6020, Mazarine 6300 and Lavender 6319. Manganese Aluminum Pink in a clear glaze does not give you pink clear. It mattes the glaze and disappoints you. In a clay body or a slip at 12 to 15 percent it is lovely. Right tool, wrong job.
Four ways in, and one of them is the one you will use.
Into wet clay, which is what you will actually do.
Dry powder into dry clay powder gives the most even result and makes the most dust. Stain into a slip is the gentlest on your wrists. Stain into wet plastic clay is what happens in a community studio, so it gets the most space here.
Into wet clay, from a bag
Soften the clay first, and weigh the stain
Soft, slightly sticky clay blends without seams. Stiff clay never welds to the paste. Weigh the powder on a gram scale, not a spoon.
Make a paste inside a sealed bag
Powder plus roughly its own weight in water, kneaded through the bag until it goes smooth like latex paint. Never sprinkle dry powder into clay. It clumps, and the clumps fire as specks.
Layer it in, then wedge until the cut face is flat
Flatten the clay into sheets, spread the paste between them, stack, and wedge. Every so often cut the ball with a wire and look at the face. Streaks mean keep going.
Bag it and rest it
Several days at least. Fresh mixed clay is too wet to throw, and resting evens out the moisture.
Soften the clay days before you start
Soft, slightly sticky clay blends without seams. Stiff clay does not weld to the paste, it just sits next to it, and no amount of wedging fixes that. If the bag is firm, open it, add water and leave it a week. Start early.
Weigh the stain, then make a paste
Put the weighed powder in a zip bag with roughly its own weight in water and knead the bag. It resists at first and feels lumpy, then gives up all at once and goes smooth. You want the consistency of latex paint or slightly thicker. Doing this inside a sealed bag means almost no dust and no stained bowl.
Never sprinkle dry powder into clay. It forms clumps that never break down and fire as specks. Paste first. Every time.
Get the paste in, layered
Flatten the clay into sheets, spread the paste between them like a lasagna, then stack. That distributes the color before wedging even starts. A well pressed into a soft ball works too and is quicker, but it takes more wedging afterward.
Wedge, gloves on, until the cut face is flat
Squeeze and fold while it is still streaky, then spiral or ram's head wedge as normal. Every so often, cut the ball in half with a wire and look at the face. Streaks, marbling or dark flecks mean keep going. Re-ball and cut again.
It takes considerably more work than wedging plain clay, and there is no number of passes that means done. The cut face decides.
Bag it and let it rest
Freshly mixed clay is too wet to throw. Double bag it and leave it several days to a couple of weeks. Resting also lets the moisture equalize, which removes the dry patches that look like bad mixing. Give it a week.
If you want it marbled instead of solid, stop early. Marbling is the same process interrupted. That reframes half the failures on this page as a different technique. Same work, stopped sooner.
Into a slip first, then into clay
This is the easiest route and it uses up dry scrap. Mix the stain into clay slip inside a sealed bag by squeezing it. Drop bone dry scrap into the colored slip and leave it twenty four hours so the dry clay drinks the color. Massage the bag to break the lumps, then wedge that into fresh plastic clay for about five minutes and rest it. No dry powder handling after the initial weigh, and far less wedging.
Into dry clay powder
Technically the best, because two dry powders blend far more completely than a powder into a plastic mass, and the percentage is honest with no water correction. Weigh both dry, blend, sieve at 120 mesh or finer to break the agglomerates, then add the mix to water rather than water to the mix and let it slake without stirring. Sieve again, dry it back on a plaster bat until plastic, then wedge and age.
This is the one step on the page where a respirator is not optional, and it is why this method belongs to a supervised session rather than open studio.
Into slip, engobe or underglaze
Same paste-first principle. Blend the stain into the dry ingredients, then bring it up with water and sieve: 80 to 120 mesh for an engobe, 120 to 200 for anything going into a glaze, which is what keeps it from specking. About one and a half percent CMC gum makes it brush properly, and around five percent bentonite adds suspension and slows the drying.
One hard rule: never ball mill an inclusion stain. Milling fractures the zircon shell and releases the cadmium inside it. That is a ruined color and a genuine hazard at the same time. Ordinary stains mill happily and come out smoother for it. Inclusion stains never do.
Mix one dark batch. Cut it with white.
Mixing four separate tints means four weighing sessions, four pastes and four rounds of wedging. There is a better way and it is how anyone running a colored clay program does it.
Mix one concentrated batch, then dilute it with plain white clay by weight:
| Colored clay | White clay | A 12% master gives you |
|---|---|---|
| 1 part | 0 | 12% |
| 1 part | 1 part | 6% |
| 1 part | 2 parts | 4% |
| 1 part | 4 parts | 2.4% |
One dusty weighing session instead of four, a whole ladder of tints, and every one of them is genuinely the same hue rather than four guesses at it. One session, four colors. It is also the safest way to run this.
And the warning that goes with it. If you like the color while it is wet, it is too dark. Add more white clay. Wet clay reads far darker than the fired result, and this single sentence prevents most first time disappointment.
Ten ways this goes badly, and the fix for each.
Four ways this goes badly on the first try.
Every one of these has happened in a studio, most of them more than once, and all of them are cheaper to read about than to discover.
The color came out speckled
Dry stain got sprinkled straight into clay or slip. It clumps, the clumps never break down, and they fire as flecks. Make a paste with water first. Every single time. This is the most common failure on the list and it is completely avoidable.
I weighed the wet clay and used too much
Clay out of the bag is roughly twenty two percent water. Eight percent of the wet weight is really about ten and a half percent of the actual clay, so you overshot by a quarter and paid for the privilege. The calculator above already takes the water out for you.
It looked right wet and fired too dark
Wet clay reads far darker than fired clay. The old rule is the right one: if you like the color while it is wet, it is too dark, and you should cut it with more white clay.
It fired duller than the test tile
A glaze suspends the pigment in glass, which refracts light back through the color. A fired clay body is opaque alumina and silica surrounding every grain of pigment, so it scatters instead. Colored clay is supposed to look chalky bisque fired. A clear glaze over the top is what makes it sing.
The pink went gray, or the green went brown
Zinc. It is the single most consequential oxide in this topic. Zinc plus chromium makes a brown spinel, so it browns the greens, and the chrome tin pinks need a calcium rich, zinc free base or they do not develop at all. Check the base first.
The red vanished
Inclusion reds and oranges are cadmium sealed inside a zircon shell, and that shell gives out somewhere around 1200 Celsius. Our glaze firing sits right at that line. Fire them hotter, soak them longer, or grind them in a ball mill and the shell breaks, the cadmium is destroyed, and the color goes with it.
My gray came out blue
You diluted a black instead of buying a gray. See the question about mixing stains below.
The nerikomi piece split along the seams
Two different base clays. Every seam in a colored clay piece runs through the whole wall, and if the two sides shrink at different rates that seam is under permanent tension. It cracks in drying, or in the bisque, or in the glaze firing, and there is no repair. Color one clay body. Never two.
The reclaim barrel got ruined
Colored scrap never goes in communal reclaim. Not a pinch of it. Sealed labeled bucket of its own, or the trash, and the wheel and the wedging table get wiped down wet before anybody else touches them. No exceptions.
Everything I own is now purple
These are dye strength pigments and the manufacturer says so in plain language on the safety sheet. Wear clothes you have given up on, keep gloves on for the messy stage, and cover any open cut. Canvas is the worst offender, because pigment lodges in the weave and transfers for weeks. Wedge on plastic.
The price per jar is not the number that matters.
A 25 gram unit of Violet is $6.85 and a unit of Claret is $0.85. That is a 8 times spread and it looks alarming enough on its own. The number that actually decides your project is what it costs to color a pound of clay, because the expensive stains tend to be the ones you need most of.
| Cheapest to work in | Per 25 g | Solid color | Per pound of clay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vivid Blue 6306 | $1.35 | 3% | $0.57 |
| Teal 6305 | $1.45 | 3% | $0.62 |
| Best Black 6600 | $1.65 | 3% | $0.70 |
| Claret 6113 | $0.85 | 6% | $0.72 |
| Dearest to work in | Per 25 g | Solid color | Per pound of clay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Violet 6304 | $6.85 | 10% | $9.69 |
| Red 6097 | $4.00 | 10% | $5.66 |
| Mango 6030 | $3.80 | 10% | $5.38 |
| Orange 6028 | $3.50 | 10% | $4.95 |
Vivid Blue costs 57 cents a pound of clay. Violet costs $9.69. A 20 pound nerikomi project in Violet is $194 of stain before you have touched the clay. The same project in Vivid Blue is $11. Same technique, 17 times the money.
Which is an argument for the master batch, not against purple. Mix a small concentrated batch of the expensive color and use it as the accent against cheap colors. Nobody needs 20 pounds of solid Violet. They need a thin line of it against a white, and half a pound of that is $4.85.
Prices on this page are what we paid for the stain plus thirty percent, which covers getting it here, the jars and the time to weigh it out. The per pound figures assume a solid color in a clay body at the percentage shown. They move when our supplier's prices move.
Yes to a respirator for the dry powder. No to almost everything else.
- Respirator on while the powder is dry. The same half mask you need for mixing glaze. Not because stains are unusually poisonous, but because you are making fine dust on purpose.
- Make the paste inside a sealed zip bag. This removes nearly all of the exposure before it exists, and it mixes better.
- Once it is wet, there is nothing to breathe. No mask for wedging, throwing or handling colored clay.
- Clean up wet. Damp sponge or a HEPA vacuum. Sweeping puts everything you settled back in the air.
- Wash your hands before you eat, and cover any open cut.
- Keep the inclusion reds and oranges off food surfaces unless the finished piece has been tested. Those are cadmium inside a shell.
Which mask, and when goes through this properly.
There is a lot of studio rumor attached to this topic, so here is what the manufacturer's own safety sheets actually say, rather than what people repeat.
All of the sheets we checked classify the stain as not a hazardous substance or mixture. Oral toxicity over 2,200 mg per kilogram. Non irritating to skin. Non irritating to eyes. Two of the four say hand and eye protection are not needed for normal use. What every one of them does say, in plain language, is to avoid making dust. So do that.
What is genuinely required
- A fitted respirator while weighing or dry mixing. A properly fitted N95 is the honest minimum and a half mask with P100 cartridges is the right studio standard. It is the same respirator this studio already needs for glaze mixing. Facial hair defeats the seal.
- Paste it, do not sprinkle it. Wet mixing is the highest value safety practice here and it also produces a better result. In a sealed bag there is essentially no dust at all, which makes the respirator question mostly moot.
- Wet cleanup, never sweeping. Damp sponge or a HEPA filtered vacuum. A shop vac without a HEPA filter makes it worse.
- Wash hands before eating or drinking, and do not eat while working.
- Gloves over any open cut. Pigment in a cut is both a stain and an absorption route.
- Never ball mill an inclusion stain. It breaks the shell and releases the cadmium and selenium inside.
What is overcautious
- Wearing a respirator to wedge, throw or handle clay that already has stain in it. There is no dust.
- Treating a sealed bag of stain, or mixed wet colored clay, as hazardous material.
- Treating stain dust as a worse silica risk than the clay. It is not. The clay and the glaze materials are by far the bigger silica exposure in any studio, and the silica in these stains is chemically bound into zircon and spinel rather than loose.
The two worth naming specifically
Cobalt and nickel carry the lowest exposure limits on any stain sheet by a wide margin, and both are in the black stains, which are also the ones people reach for most. Be tidy with Best Black and Onyx in particular.
Cadmium is in the inclusion reds, Orange, Tangerine and Mango. As sold and as fired correctly they are considered safe to use, and the encapsulation is what makes that true. Break the shell by milling them, overfiring them or grinding a fired edge, and that stops being true. Do not assume a finished piece is food safe because the cadmium started out encapsulated. Have it tested.
More on all of this in Masks and Respirators: which one, and when and The Risks Every Potter Should Know.
Six people, showing the parts that are hard to write down.
One video, start to finish.
None of these are ours and none of them are sponsored. They are the clearest teaching we could find on each part of this. Watch the first one.
Nothing from YouTube loads until you tap a frame, apart from the still picture on it, which comes from Google while you read.
Colored clay is the start of about six other techniques.
Nerikomi is hand built. Neriage is thrown. Agateware is the English word for the marbled result and gets used for both. Millefiori is the cane and slice version. The terms get used loosely by good potters, and the distinction that actually holds is that neriage happens on the wheel and nerikomi happens in your hands.
The rest is argument.
Nerikomi is hand built. Neriage is thrown. Both start with exactly what you just bought.
The rule that decides whether any of it survives. Use the same base clay for every color. Not a similar clay. The same body, colored differently. Every seam in a colored clay piece runs through the whole wall, and two clays that shrink at different rates put that seam under permanent tension. It splits in drying, or in the bisque, or in the glaze firing. There is no repair.
- Mason Stains in Clay, Slip and GlazeThe University lesson. The theory this page skips over, plus a quiz.
- Nerikomi: patterned colored clayBuild a loaf of stacked colored clay, slice it, and every face carries the pattern.
- Neriage: throwing with colored clayMarbling done on the wheel, including how to rib the gray smear off the surface.
- Complete guide to clay bodiesShrinkage and vitrification, which is the rule that decides whether a nerikomi piece survives drying.
- Engobes, and when to use oneA stained engobe gets you a clay color we will never stock a bag of.
- Oxides, carbonates and ceramic stainsWhat the raw colorants do on their own, and why a stain behaves better.
- Mishima: slip inlayCarve a line, flood it with stained slip, scrape it back. A drawn line that sits in the clay.
- How to use underglazeIf you are mixing your own, this is what it has to behave like when you are done.
- Surface design: the giant guideTwenty seven ways to decorate a pot, with colored clay as one family of them.
The nine that come up most.
Can I just buy a whole pound?
Not off this page. We sell these by the 25 grams because almost nobody needs a pound and a pound of the expensive ones would run you over a hundred dollars. Most people overbuy. If you are running a big project and you genuinely need bulk, talk to the owner and we will order it in for you at cost.
Why does the powder look nothing like the fired color?
Because the color you are looking at in the jar is loose particles scattering light in air, and the color you get out of the kiln is that same crystal sitting in glass or in a fired clay body. Different optics entirely. On top of that the glaze chemistry gets a vote: the same pink powder is pink in a calcium glaze and gray in a zinc one.
The photographs on this page have been edited toward the fired color, because a picture of the raw powder would teach you the wrong thing. Treat them as a guide to the family, not a color chip. The bag you take home will look different.
Can I use colored clay on a mug I drink out of?
Glazed with a well melted clear, yes. That is the standard safe setup and it is also the one that makes the color look best.
Bare colored clay on a food surface is the configuration to avoid, especially at high percentages. The outside of a mug, a vase, a sculpture, a plate rim that never touches food: all fine. The inclusion reds and oranges are the one family we would keep off food surfaces entirely unless you have had the finished piece tested.
Do I actually need a respirator?
For weighing and dry mixing the powder, yes. Not because these are unusually poisonous, but because you are making fine airborne dust on purpose, and a lungful of any of it is pointless. The same half mask you already need for mixing glaze is the right tool.
For wedging, throwing or handling clay that already has stain in it, no. There is no dust. Mixing the paste inside a sealed bag removes nearly all of the exposure before it ever exists. Wet is safe.
Can colored clay scrap go in the reclaim?
No. Ever. One gram of Best Black in a communal barrel ruins the whole thing, and it will not show until somebody fires a pot. By then it is everybody's problem.
Colored scrap goes in a sealed labeled bucket of its own or in the trash. Wash water from colored work goes in its own bucket. Wipe the wheel tray, the bats, the wire and the wedging table down wet before the next person uses them.
My pink came out gray. What happened?
You put a chrome tin pink in a glaze that had no calcium in it, or that had zinc in it, or both. That family needs calcium to develop the color at all, and zinc turns the chromium brown. A chrome tin pink in the wrong base does not go pale. It goes gray.
Shell Pink, Alpine Rose, Violet and Pansy Purple are the ones on this page that care. In a clay body they behave. It is glazes that catch people out.
What happens if I use too much?
Three things, in this order. The color stops getting noticeably deeper somewhere around ten percent, so you are buying nothing. The stain is mostly refractory powder with no plasticity of its own, so past ten percent or so you are meaningfully diluting the clay and the body gets shorter and harder to work. And the shrinkage moves, which matters enormously if that clay has to sit fused against another color. Ten percent is plenty.
Can I mix two stains together?
Yes, and it is how you get colors nobody sells. The one thing not to do is dilute a black to get a gray. Blacks are built out of cobalt, iron, nickel, chromium and manganese together, and at low percentages whichever oxide dominates takes over, so a diluted black comes out blue or green or brown. Buy Taupe or Gun Metal for gray.
Does it have to be porcelain?
No, but every color reads cleanest on a white body and every color gets muddier on a darker one. Iron in a stoneware shifts everything gray. A pastel in a dark stoneware is close to pointless.
If you are chasing the color, work on white. If you like what iron does to it, that is a legitimate choice. It is also cheaper.
Buy a little, fire a tile, then commit.
Twenty five grams is enough to color about a pound of clay at a solid loading, which is enough for a row of test tiles in three percentages. That is the cheapest hour you will ever spend on this, and it is the difference between a color you chose and a color you ended up with. Fire the tile.
Twenty five grams colors about a pound of clay. Fire a tile before you commit a project to a color. There is a much longer version of this page behind the toggle at the top if you want the reasons behind any of it.
Mason stains are weighed out by the owner or the main hand building instructor, and they get paid for first. Colored clay scrap never goes in the communal reclaim.
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.