Now that we're moving on to these more advanced techniques and you're beginning to personalize your vessels, an important aspect of being a ceramic artist is developing your own glaze palette and your personal glazes and important so important aspect of that is the glaze test. So right now I would like to show you how to throw some quick glaze test tiles. And I like throwing my test off for a couple reasons. Because if you're going to be glazing, thrown pieces, the glaze made here to the surface reacts slightly different than it would to a handbill piece. If you can be glazing thrown vessels, it makes sense that you're testing your glazes on a thrown test. You can test those are so important because they're going to tell you a number of things about the glaze because the glazes are so sensitive to firing conditions firing process, application, whether you're brushing it on dipping Rain and also the thickness of the glazes.

So whether you're using the commercial or homemade recipes, making your own glazes, it is still important to test them against especially if you know if they're commercial. I think as a commercial glades, it's going to come out blue every time. Again, those those commercial places are still susceptible to those binary conditions and application conditions. And the test those are also going to tell you a number of things. If we take a look at this Ruto mat here, it's also going to tell you no okay, if it gets a little bit thicker, it's going to go on wider, but it's also going to tell you how that glaze is going to break over the texture, or perhaps if it's going to totally cover up the texture. So there are a couple things that you're going to want on your test house.

One good idea to put a hole in so they're easy to hang on the wall or to string up to save studio space. Also, you're gonna want some of that texture on there to see how the glaze is gonna break. You want your textiles to be large enough two to three inches, that you can get a good sense of what the glaze is going to do. You don't want these tiny little test dolls or it's hard to really see what the big He's gonna do because a good way of working or glazes are testing them is to apply the entire, you know, three quarters of the piece with one dip or one coat and then the top half of two coats and then the very top third of it with three coats. And that'll give you you know, an idea of what the glaze is going to do then to medium application to a thick application, because you want to get as much information out of those test files as you can.

So, we're gonna show you how to throw a quick test off. We're gonna line up our Where's clay on the bat here, working in clapping into position at our water. gonna count it up, back down. And basically what I'm going to do here is throw a ring of clay without a bottom. So what we need to do is to compress this clay all the way down into a dome shape about as wide as we want our textile ring to be. If I was just open this clear Now and try to stretch that clay all the way out to that textile ring, there's a good chance it's going to become detached from the bad because I'm stretching it beyond the location where it's at here to that bat.

So, to dome this clay out to that outside edge, he's more pressure with that outside hand while supporting the walls with your left hand, allowing that clay to flow outward. Looks like a pretty good dome shape there next and open up our clay all the way down to the bat, cuz you don't need a floor on these tests. Because as we cut them up, we're just looking for these little stands of test I'll open it up all the way the bat, and as I open this up, I'm going to compress down inside a little Now that I'm getting close to the width that I'd like my my chest all ring to be, I want to take my inside fingers and raise them up roughly a quarter inch and create a little foot on the inside. And this is going to be important for stability because you want your test to be stable enough to stand in the kilt.

And that reminds me of another good point, you always want your test tiles to be vertical, unless you're doing a mosaic work or place. But 90% of the time, we're going to be doing vertical pieces. So you want to see how that glaze is gonna run. If you're doing flat test tiles or slab test tiles, it's not going to give you an accurate reading of what that glaze is going to do. Now I'm going to raise my fingers up about that quarter inch and continue to pull out. You can see right here we're creating this foot inside of this ring.

And again, that is for stability. But you'll see me come back and talk about this internal foot often on doing depending on the forms we're talking about. And I bring it up now because it's very easy to see it because this is such an open forum When we start talking about doing ovals and certain distortions within our form, we're going to come back and visit this idea of an internal foot. Next, simply pull your walls up, meaning your test style slightly inward towards that foot again for that stability, not the outside surface. Next one add my texture. So let me know how this glaze is going to break.

And I'm just simply using a fork to run along that surface. Now we can set this off to the side that is set up to about that leather hard state and then we can come in and begin to cut this up. Let's see if we can cut right now just to illustrate how this works. should look something like so, and then once it sets up you can come in with either your knife or your drill bit once again and place your hole in there. Now you have a number of tests all within this one ring. I probably have anywhere to 2025 test calls right here that we'd knocked out in just a matter of minutes.

And remember, testing is so important on your glazes test test test is best to have a glaze mishap mess up a test towel, something like this that you only fit spent a matter of minutes on compared to some large throne vessels or these intricate pieces that you've spent hours and hours on and time within a glazing aid and disk firing it is crucially crucially important to test your glazes