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In her porcelain workshops at TeachinArt, Antoinette Badenhorst demonstrates how excessive water during wheel throwing can quickly cause porcelain clay - which she calls the “Diva of Clay” - to weaken and collapse.
Porcelain requires careful moisture control because of its fine particle structure and delicate balance between strength and softness. During wheel throwing, too much water can oversaturate the clay body, reducing stability and making walls soft, uneven, or unable to support their own weight.
Antoinette explains how beginners often rely on excess water while centering and pulling clay, not realizing that porcelain absorbs moisture rapidly. As the clay becomes overly saturated, forms begin to slump, lose definition, or completely collapse on the wheel.
In her demonstrations, students learn:
  • How to control water usage while throwing porcelain
  • Proper hand pressure and wheel speed
  • Techniques for maintaining wall strength
  • How to recognize signs of oversaturation
  • Methods for preserving clean forms and elegant lines
By understanding the sensitive nature of translucent porcelain, ceramic artists can develop stronger wheel-throwing skills and greater confidence when working with this demanding but rewarding clay body.
Through detailed online instruction, Antoinette helps potters understand not only how porcelain behaves, but why proper technique is essential for successful wheel-thrown ceramics.
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Antoinette Badenhorst interviews internationally respected ceramic artist Michael Schwegmann in a thoughtful discussion about functional pottery, craftsmanship, kiln firing, teaching, and artistic growth. Known for his expressive surfaces, wood firing expertise, and dedication to studio pottery, Michael shares insights into creative discipline, clay preparation, form development, and building a lifelong career in ceramics. This inspiring interview explores the philosophy, techniques, and passion behind professional pottery and ceramic education.
​Michael Schwegmann is an award winning porcelain artist who came from a heritage of craftsmen. 
Through his porcelain clay processes he tells stories about tradesman, their tools and machinery. Empty paint cans become canvasses through which he stages the finished job and the worker. He opens up conversations with his patriotic objects about the US flag and military equipment.​
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Bradley Gordon is a wildlife painter from Oxford Mississippi. He exhibited his colorful paintings in the Gumtree Museum of Art in Tupelo, Mississippi - the birthplace of Elvis Presley. His art is inspired by Japanese Pop Art and is enriched by his upbringing in the Mississippi Delta. Gordon studied at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and taught English in Taiwan and Japan.
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Right from his early days (60+ years ago), Ron was looking for a canvas on which he could apply a pottery glaze. Creating pottery with thicker or thinner rims would dictate which glaze would go where. 
In his earliest days, information of raw materials was hard to come by, so potters often had to guess their way through recipes. Then calculating the percentages of different ingredients to assure that there is not too much or too little of either a flux (an oxide that lowers the melting temperature of refractory oxides), or a stabilizer (alumina) or a glass former (silica or borax) in a pottery glaze, never turned out the same two times in a row. 
Ron wanted to visualize the inside of a ceramic glaze, so when he got his first computer, a new world opened for him. This experience of getting to know glaze making and to break the uncertainty and thumb sucking to obtain good and stable glazes became reality when Tony Hansen from Digital fire fame created the first Insight program. 
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It was with this program that Ron Roy became the glaze doctor, helping potters around the globe to fix glazing problems and to obtain sturdy clay and glazes. 
Being a person that believe you have to give to receive, his contributions to Clayart, is (at age 86) to this day still unmeasurable.

The pottery book Mastering Cone 6 glazes, with co-author John Hesselberth is back on the market after it was first published in 2002. This book took the potters market by storm and almost every potter that worked at ^6 developed glazes from there; learning about the importance of stable and food safe glazes. ( scroll down for video)
Now he brings us Glazing with Ron Roy. After years of personal exploration of glazes, helping other potters to improve and fix faulty glazes, he offers an online class which will allow you to be directly in conversation with him about remedying glazes. Ron will show you step by step  examples of how to use the free Insight program, a frontrunner of the Insight-live program. He will also share with you the follow-up Ron Roy Glaze book in PDF format. ​
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Mastering Cone 6 glazes By John Hesselberth and Ron Roy

This book offers something different from what potters find in other pottery glaze books. John and Ron discuss what stable and durable ceramic glazes mean. 
They give basic information about buying, storing, weighing, and mixing pottery glazes. 
They teach you how to test for stability, clay, and glaze fit on clayware, resistance to flaws like too soft glazes, causing scratch marks on dinnerware. How to resist glazes on kitchenware to become damaged by acids and alkalis, and how to prevent pottery breaking apart due to terminal shock.
They teach potters how to fit a glaze and prevent shivering ( which will result in glass flakes on pottery), dunting and crazing of pottery.
The book concludes with stoneware, porcelain, and specialty glazes and how to develop your own glazes. ​

​Online Glazing with Ron Roy on Insight

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Porcelain plates by Ron Roy

Glaze book in PDF format by 
Ron Ro content list
​​Expansion coefficients
Limit formulas
Typical Analysis - Glaze materials
Typical Analysis - Feldspars & Spodumenes
Analysis for selected Frits
Typical analysis - clays
The oxides
Glaze defects
Firing Up
Cooling Down
Glaze Test Preparation
Testing for Fit (expansion / contraction)
Testing clay to see if it will leak
Fixing clay and glaze problems
Molecular Weights
Hazards and All Glazes Leach - safety
Recommended Texts and web sites