I'd love to know more about layering glazes!! I've taken ceramic classes in school and as you can imagine we were limited to single glazes to stop kids from mixing things together with too-early second coats.
Ooohhh get ready for another ramble because I am SO into glaze layering (tho also very early on in the journey...now that I have a kiln, I'll have way more capacity for tossing in some test tiles alongside the proper work, so hopefully I'm only getting nerdier in this aspect of the craft!).
A couple of beasts featuring cool surface effects via layering glazes!
The main thing that got me properly into glaze layering was the fact that both Mayco & Amaco provide online resources for layering their glazes, which provided me with a foundation to start from when deciding what glazes to layer.
Mayco's glaze layering resource
Amaco's Glaze layering resource
With few exceptions, all of my layered glazes have been based on suggestions from those sites. Of course, most look slightly different from the reference photos provided due to firing temp/clay type, but it's amazing to have something to work from!
The other crucial thing that comes along with glaze layering (& just glazing in general!) is keeping a record of your choices. I've got a two-pronged system going now where I write everything down in a notebook while working, then take proper photos when the pieces are done & put it in an app on my phone called ClayLab.
This allows me to more easily organize my glaze results & reference them in a more streamlined way than my initial system of 'read tragically messy notes in notebook while scrolling through my overloaded & disorganized phone photo album'. Sometimes apps DO make things easier!
Here are some photos of my not-at-all-unhinged notebook scrawlings & a screenshot of the ClayLab app:
The app lets you apply all kinds of info to each entry & then filter by all those categories (eg. type of vessel/creature, glaze name, clay type, etc). I really do recommend it if you want a non-stressful way of keeping track of your glazing choices!
So yeah!! I hope this was a little bit helpful? I'll be talking a bit more about my personal favourite glazes/layered glazes in a future ask, which I'll post soon!
