More Paint Chatter

[Judy K]

Oh my goodness it is Christmas early at your house. How exciting!

I would give the guy a call just in case he is the rare organized person. But you are probably right. Just ask him on the phone if he remembers what is in the peanut butter jars. That will let you know if he will be any help. Then give him your number in case it comes to him in the middle of the night.

Then I would buy a new thing of gum arabic just so that your experiments have a known constant and don't fail due to some weird grey stuff.

Then I would start making sample pieces like already recommended and mark each one carefully before firing. Each time you open the kiln will be like Christmas with mountains of new information and tools to play with. How exciting. You have been given a treasure chest.

Don't discard stuff the first time it fails. There may be another solution for it in the future.

I don't want to be rude. I do not know your painting experience. Do you know how to lay down a nice even thin matt of paint? Thick paint can boil on you and also make an experiment seem to fail unnecessarily.

Wow! Tooooo fun.

[Rebecca]

Judy is right about glass paint frying.  The experiments I have done with ceramic paint seem to work better thick, but the color is opaque.

I have heard you can use flat Seven-Up to mix glass paint, but I've never tried it.

Rebecca

[Ian]

The usual cause of glass paint frying is the addition of too much gum arabic and secondly heating  wet paint too quickly.
to mix your paint, place a little of the powder on a clean glass slab and then workout any lumps with a small steel spatula.
When the paint is free of lumps add a touch of gum arabic sprinkled like salt on top of the powder. Add water with a eye dropper while mixing in a circular motion a drop at a time until you get it to where you can draw a line with a thin paint brush. To lay a matte thin some of your mixed paint a tad more with water and using a broad varnish type brush apply to the glass and then before it dries use a soft brush like a haik brush and barely touching the wet paint with the tip of the haik fan it across the paint to spread it  What you actually need for matting is a good badger hair brush. I hope this will at least get you going so that you can find out if those big jars are actually sunshine or not.
Regards
Ian

[Ian]

by the way that is a badger blender brush on the shelf in front of the bottles of paint