Amazing Pottery

How to get gloss black pottery?

I have a peice of pottery and I want to fire it in a pit and i want it to come out black like the native american pottery. How do I go about doing this. Thank you

Public Comments

1. Instructions: http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa024.shtml If you just happen to be out of cow dung, I think you can just smoke your pot, though it may not get completely even. To smoke your pot either take a metal bucket (needs to have holes around the bottom for draft) or build an enclosure out of dry brick (just stack them). If you use brick, it's good not to put them too tight, you want air to be able to get in. Fill your container with sawdust and bury your ceramic in there (glazed areas won't absorb smoke). Light top of sawdust by dropping lighted paper on there. Put some piece of metal lid on top (metal dustbin lid, piece of sheet metal, whatever you have around) to keep smoke in. Let burn down, then look what you got. If you have raku clay (more thermal shock resistant), you can do raku, that gets nice and even because your ceramic is red hot when you put it into the sawdust. If you want to have it glossy, you will have to burnish your clay when it's leather hard.
2. Well, for a glossy black you will need a glaze in that color with a glossy finish. Now if you're trying to get the matte black that looks like most indian pottery you will want to do the reduction in newspaper or something that will cast its black ashes onto it. If you are firing in a pit it will probably be black anyways - I've never done it like that yet. My experience was with Raku - but I fired it in a gas kiln to tempature and then took it immediately to a garbage can with newspaper in it, let it flare up for a few seconds, covered it and let it sit for about 15 minutes. When you pull it out, the areas that weren't glazed are a nice matte black.
3. -Burnishing- You've gotten some good replies already, but I wanted to add that I remember reading that one important step in producing the smooth, shiny pots that some Native Americans preferred was burnishing the dried pot before firing, to compress the clay particles at the surface. They would use hard, smooth, stream-worn stones or pieces of smooth, hard wood or bone to burnish their pots, but you could use the back (convex side) of a spoon. Burnishing, (rubbing firmly with a smooth, hard tool), was also used to polish soft metals like gold, silver, or bronze in other ancient cultures. The burnished pots were smoke fired at a relatively low temperature, so that the smooth finish wouldn't be spoiled - but that meant that those pots wouldn't work as well for holding water. OK... here's a couple of web pages which describes the process... http://vickihardin.com/articles/pit-fire-ceramics.html http://www.collectorsguide.com/fa/fa024.shtml
4. do like the ancient indians & use the magical aerosol spray can . chief tp.