How to deal with glazing tong marks?
Strategic Glazing Q&A
This video clip is from a live Q&A session about my free Strategic Glazing class. Watch the video above or read the text version below to learn about consistency with brushing glazes.
Question: When using tongs, what is a reliable method for covering the small holes left behind in a way that doesn’t show as a different color in the fired piece?
Dealing with tong marks
If I have tong marks after glazing my piece, I would just take a little pointy brush and touch up with a bit of glaze. Generally, the glaze should all melt together and you shouldn’t be able to see them.
One reason why you could still see your tong marks after the glaze firing is if your glaze is under-fired and not completely melted, so it’s a stiffer glaze and not fluid enough.
Flocculating can help prevent tong marks
Another way to prevent tong marks is to flocculate your glaze. When you flocculate your glaze, it lengthens the time the glaze takes to dry, which can remove imperfections like drips and tong marks.
With some glazes, we dip our pot and pull it out, and then the glaze just dries instantly. You can watch it go from wet to dry in a couple seconds. And sometimes that can leave drips and marks that show up after the glaze firing because they don’t have time to smooth over before they dry unevenly.
But when you flocculate your glaze, the flocculating helps the clay in the glaze recipe to hang on to the water so the water doesn’t get sucked into the bisque right away. Some of the water gets held in between the particles in the glaze. When the water stays in the glaze a little bit longer, that helps the glaze to smooth over before it dries instantly and you get those marks.
Every glaze will be different. Some glazes are very sensitive to thickness so you have these tong marks which are very thin spots. And then you do a little dab of glaze over top of the tong marks, creating thick spots. You might see those if you have a glaze that is very sensitive to application thickness, where it’s one color where it’s thin and another color where it’s thick.
But generally, a glaze should liquefy and everything should smooth over, and you shouldn’t be able to see those. It just really depends on the recipe.
Pay attention to how long it takes your glaze to dry
But one thing you can pay attention to if you’re struggling with tong marks, is how long it takes your glaze to dry after you pull it out of the bucket. If it’s dry before you’ve (sometimes very awkwardly) removed your tongs from the piece, trying not to smear the glaze everywhere – if it dries within a couple seconds, then you may look into flocculating with Epsom salts to increase the amount of time it takes to dry.
Ideally, when you remove the tongs, the glaze is still a little bit wet, and you can touch it up and everything will smooth over.
In conclusion…
So that is my advice about tong marks. It’s usually a case of the glaze drying really fast, and so you have this very obvious drip.
Flocculating with Epsom salts can help to give a more even application because you remove your pot from the bucket and then the glaze takes a few more seconds to dry, giving a little more time for it to smooth out. Taking up to a minute to dry is perfect. More than a minute, I would say, is too long and could be an indication of too many layers, saturated bisque, or a glaze that needs to be deflocculated.
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