Second firing of bisque-fired clay with slips, underglazes, stains and oxides or a cold finish?

Looking for a natural finish without a shiny glaze

So my pieces are out of the kiln. They aren't quite finished, so what next?

They all survived well. I like the raw look but I don't like the pink colour of the bisque-fired clay. I am aiming for a matt look which doesn't mask the piece, after all, its the figure that needs to tell the story, not its covering. Glaze is, of course, glass, a hard, shiny, dead coating, which doesn't really suit my work which aims to be very much alive. So I thought I'd research different options.

I really like the surface of Beth Cavenagh's work, have a look at her excellent website https://followtheblackrabbit.com/ . She uses paint, spray-painted latex paint, or occasionally terra sigillata and porcelain vitreous slips.

Or for re-firing techniques, there are Anna Noel's fantastic creatures www.annanoelceramics.co.uk I love them and I love the matt finish which works so well with them. She coats them with thin porcelain slip and bisque fires them. Then she uses a limited range of oxides and coloured slips before re-firing (Perryman, 2004).

I do like the look of porcelain slip, but I think it can be problematic putting slip on bisque ware because the slip could crack as it shrinks faster than the piece. Some ceramicists get around this by diluting it with water. Underglazes are more shrink-resistant than slips so this could be a way forward. I have to confess I did find it confusing as underglazes in the broader sense is a term that can apply to any decoration that goes 'under the glaze', so this can include slips and stains, but there are liquids marketed as underglazes which are shrink-resistant coloured slips. Thank you to the Spruce Crafts web page for helping me understand this.

So I'll look at white underglazes and ask some of my clay sculpture friends what they use. I would like to have a background other than pink, so I could use an underglaze and then some oxides over that. I have heard it again and again that it is very important to test, test and re-test before working on my favourite sculptures and after you've put your heart and soul into a sculpture, it is very sad to 'ruin it' with the glazing. I do have a lot of bisque-fired sculptures that I could use as tests.

Also, I could look at using latex paint. I do like the look of it, and it has the advantage of not needing another firing. Alternatively I could use polishes, such as shoe polish (now have I still got any trainer whitener I had at school anywhere?

I will post my experiments here, even the failures!