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There are many options for putting vibrant designs onto porcelain china to-day. Some, like decoupage, water-slide stickers and air-dry paints like Delta Air-Dry PermEnamel are within the reach of any house crafter.

Others, like dye sublimation printing, transfer printing and hand-glazing high-fired pottery require substantial investment in equipment and are best suited to well-capitalized companies and artists co-operatives. My Www.Woodlooktiles.Com/ includes supplementary info concerning the meaning behind it.

The 2 traditional ways of getting designs onto pottery, hand-painting and transfer printing, still exist to-day. Browse here at the link http://woodlooktiles.com to check up where to engage in it. Furthermore, there's a high-tech version of water-slide decals used commercially which includes using the decals to the porcelain and screen-printing decals with glazes. In each case, the art is high-fired before decorating to at-least cone 6. [Cone is just a measure of heat absorption resulting from heat applied over time. Cone 6 means between 2165 and 2269 degrees F (according to how quickly the kiln cooks or ramps up ).] Such high-firing provides the hard almost-translucent quality-of genuine porcelain. Then the part is decorated and carefully fired repeatedly to melt and fuse the glazes to the pottery.

Incidentally, the term porcelain has been used more and more generally as new practices developed. Ask any potter to define porcelain and he'll likely give the traditional description to you. To your potter, genuine porcelain is high-fired (cone 6 or more) white clay that's at the very least somewhat clear. It's a big proportion of kaolin clay, with the rest being mostly feldspar and silica. This clay composition makes up about the pure white gleam of pottery.

Artists who paint porcelain (rather than actually make it) reference three qualities of porcelain: hard-paste, soft-paste, and bone china. They all include kaolin but only hard-paste has silica and feldspar and is high-fired. The high temperatures cause the human body and the glaze to fuse. When hard-paste porcelain is broken, it's impossible-to distinguish the human body from the glaze.

Soft-paste porcelain adds ground glass or frit (material for glass that is not yet fused and vitrified) and is fired to between 1 and cone 01 (1999 to 2109 degrees F). Because soft-pa