A Matter of Glazing

 

I did a post about this little owl wall plaque after I sculpted it, but now it's glazed.

 

I'm getting practice with blending different glazes into each other as there are three different blues in the background, with the darkest at the top and the lightest at the bottom.  Not seeking a perfectly smooth transition helps!

 

I originally glazed both the star in the sky and the star on the owl's chest white.  But when I took it out of the kiln I saw that the star on his chest didn't show up at all.  So I painted it light blue acrylic then sealed it with a gloss varnish.  You can't really tell that the star is painted and not glazed.  It would have been nice to glue on one of my vintage glass star cabochons, but, unfortunately, I didn't think of it at the right time.  In the future, I'll have to experiment with adding metallic lustre glazes, but that would mean a third firing as they fire at lower temperatures than the regular glazes.

 

One important lesson that I learned with this piece is that I have to carefully choose what glaze I'm going to put over the stamped lettering to make sure it shows - which it doesn't in this piece.  And that will require some pre-planning.  In this case, I didn't have a dark blue glaze that would do the trick, so I should have placed the lettering at the bottom of the plaque.