Glazes

For the glazes, I had a few options. I could use one solid glaze, multiple brush on glazes, or underglazes and a clear glaze on top, so I played around with a few options.

Underglaze

An underglaze is used under a clear overglaze and can be used to add details that you can't get with a regular glaze. What I was aiming for in this process was to have the underglaze bring out the pattern of the scales. I tested out five different underglazes: copper, cobalt, iron, manganese and manganese gold. I made test pieces out of white earthenware, and pressed a sheet of metal with holes in onto the top to produce 'scales' so I could see how they would interact and bring out the texture. 

I tested out two different methods for applying them. First, I brushed the glazes onto a test piece, then wipe a potion of it off with a damp sponge. This was to see how each of them would turn out, as either a solid colour or only in the indents of the scales. As you can see, the only underglaze that managed to cover the scales entirely was mango gold (bottom right), the others, even without wiping any glaze off, still showed the scales. I also left a portion of each tile without any clear overglaze so I could see the difference of each underglaze with and without the overglaze. 

Brush on Glazes

Brush on glazes allow you to either coat the entire surface with on colour, or to add patterns. I used this option to explore recreating real snakes and their colourings. Here I have a King-snake, Blue Malayan Coral Snake and a Green Tree Cobra.

After doing these, I realised getting a realistic looking snake which had colour was going to be very hard as the glazes we had were far too bright and unpredictable for me to reliably mimic a snake. Because of this I chose to do a far simpler, but also one of my favourites, the Black King-snake. 

Luster

Luster's are an overglaze, to be put on top of an already glaze-fired piece, so the piece will require 3 separate firings. They are made of particles of metal suspended in a liquid medium, usually a pine oil resin. Once fired they are opaque and a little goes a very long way. I had first thought of using a gold cluster, but I found they were out of gold and they wouldn't e able to get it in for another few weeks, so I chose bronze instead, which didn't look too different anyway. I applied the bronze luster onto the eyes of my black king snake as well as adding a few dots all over its body, being careful not to put too many, or to smudge it as luster will never dry until fired. I loved how this turned out 

After this, I decided that I would do this to all my snakes. They would be Black King-snakes with bronze luster on their eyes and little dots on their bodies.