Playing with Gloop

I came across some intriguing structural glazes on Instagram by an American artist called Phillip Kupferschmidt. He uses a gloop type glaze to create stunning 3D effects on clay, his colours are very bright and vivid, but the way they look on the surface of ceramics had potential for my fungal inspired forms, and as I was still wrestling with what to do with the surfaces I thought it was worth some more experimentation. 

I had already found the recipe on Glazy and had had some success with the test results that I mentioned in a previous post. I was trying to work out how to get the gloop to attach more effectively to the bisqued surface, and it seems that applying underglaze first is the way forward so I had a little play with some pieces I had left over from breakages and on some other work that had been made to test on.

Below is an image of Kupferschmidt's work. 

The piece below was sprayed with blue underglaze, over a black stoneware clay body. I attached random blobs of gloop trying to make it drippier, gloop has a high quantity of Nepheline Syenite and is a similar consistency to egyptian paste.  I twisted the different colours together in a nerikomi style to see if the glaze would melt and the colours bleed into each other. 

The results were disappointing, despite the use of underglaze, lots of the gloop fell off and the black clay just swallowed up all the blue underglaze.

There is no doubt I could have continued to push this and I think eventually it would have resulted in some successes, but I also recognised that this gloop 'rabbit hole' was a distraction because I was feeling disheartened and had gotten restless. Despite the rather fun  'Skittles' look of gloop I drew a line under taking it any further on my MA.