This cup came about because I was testing Amaco’s underglazes at cone 10 and also trying to find out if they would work with my clear glaze at cone 10. I started by doing test tiles testing the colors individually, and I found that 90% of them worked fine at both cone 5 & 10. Next, I used successfully fired ones in a more painterly way to test how well they mix and match to create a palette, to see how well the colors stay true once fired when combined, and to see if they still fire successfully (no bubbling, crawling, etc.) when combined, and, lastly, to test if the colors fade with clear glaze over them. My biggest takeaway from the process was that I have to use a lot more layers of underglaze than I thought because the clear definitely made the underglazes lighter in saturation. So if you are going for subtle painterly effects with underglaze, go ahead and make it much more pronounced than you think it should be since it will be subtle after the clear is applied.
