Working With Porcelain: Why It Isn’t Difficult—Just Different
Porcelain is often regarded as a challenging clay body to work with.  Potters who attempted it often like the medium, however some give up not understanding how to handle the medium. They perceive it as fragile, finicky, and tedious. However, my challenging personality and years of experience have led me to a different perspective. Today, I advocate for working with porcelain clay. While it is demanding,  the rewards and benefits make it all worthwhile. ​
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My Early Journey With Porcelain Clay
My first experiences working with porcelain, was unsuccessful. To make it worse, more experienced potters and instructors  intimidated me. In my early days of pottery I created simple forms, fired to cone 8.  
Much of my early porcelain work ended up in pit firings. I created incredibly thin porcelain pieces that were fired in pits. These works eventually helped me secure permanent residency for my family and me in the United States.  
Those early works evolved into sculptural pit-fired pieces that carried my emotions during a time that I was still griefing the loss of leaving my home country,  South Africa.
​Eventually, the heaviness lifted. I began seeing light, movement, and ballerinas in sheer dresses in my mind’s eye. Southern Ice porcelain became my medium of joy. Translucency, color, and light became symbols of the future.

​Porcelain isn’t difficult. It’s different.
Unlike stoneware or earthenware, porcelain is worked as clay but becomes something closer to glass when fired.
Understanding that single truth changes everything about how you handle, design, and fire it.

Why Porcelain Cracks: Understanding the Real Causes 
Cracking in porcelain isn’t random—it’s usually caused by handling, design, firing, or glazing mistakes, to name a few.  Over the years, I’ve seen every kind of crack imaginable, both in my own studio and in work sent to me by students from around the world through TeachinArt.com.
Let’s break them down.

​Why Porcelain Handles Crack (And How to Fix It)
Many potters struggle with porcelain handles. The real culprit in most cases is particle orientation.
Clay shrinks in unison only when its particles are aligned and compacted evenly. A handle, unconditionally of the way it is formed,  has its own direction of particles, and when you attach it to a mug, it’s like two traffic flows meeting head-on.
You need an off-ramp.
How to Attach Porcelain Handles Successfully

• Score and wet thoroughly. (remember slip particles are diluted and in disarray!)
• Attach when both parts are equally moist
• Compress and blend the joint well
• Think about handles as foreign objects that must become unified with the form

If cracks still appear, look at possible mistakes in your design and firing schedule, not just the joint.

Preventing Design Cracks in Porcelain Work 
Porcelain must be formed evenly. Uneven thickness leads to slumping, tearing, and cracking.
At high temperatures, porcelain becomes  pyro plastic — it softens like glass. 

Design Tips for Porcelain

• Keep walls consistent in thickness
• Avoid heavy areas attached to thin ones. 
• Heavy clay will be drawn towards the kiln shelf and will drag thinner clay along with it. 

Firing Cracks and Dunting in Porcelain
Dunting happens when the kiln heats or cools too fast. It can occur in bisque or glaze firing.
If a piece comes out of the kiln split cleanly in two, or cracks days later with sharp, glassy edges—the cooling cycle is usually to blame.  
Dunts in bisque ware is not   common in porcelain clay, but glaze cracking happens often.  
How to Prevent Firing Cracks

• Slow down your firing and especially the cooling schedule
• Pay special attention to cooling around quartz inversion
• Don’t rush porcelain through temperature changes

Antoinette Badenhorst, a renowned potter, presents online classes and hands-on workshops worldwide. In 2014, she and her husband, Koos, founded TeachingArt Online School of Art. Together with other experienced and renown teachers, they provide comprehensive online courses for potters and artists globally. These comprehensive learning experiences are meticulously designed to enhance skills, boost confidence, and foster a deeper understanding of pottery, rather than offering mere demonstrations. 

If you enjoyed and gained something from this blog post, please share it with your friends. Unfortunately, I won’t be traveling abroad this year because I need to catch up on my studio work and am also writing a book. 
Details of my next ​porcelain workshop is available  on the Workshop page

Antoinette shares some of her porcelain secrets in this behind-the-scenes look at one of her first porcelain workshops in Canada. She shows how you can take a leather-hard porcelain bowl and safely bring it back to a soft, workable state—then reshape or sculpt it into a beautiful new form.
You’ll see how she creates a press mold and turns it into a bowl, while explaining why it’s important for potters to truly understand porcelain as a material and build a relationship with it.
Antoinette likes to call porcelain a “diva” 😄 because it has its own personality and needs to be handled with care. She even touches on the history of porcelain to help explain its unique characteristics.
The video features highlights from her hands-on workshop, where she teaches both handbuilding and wheel-throwing techniques. Since that first workshop, Antoinette has gone on to teach porcelain classes around the world

Antoinette's porcelain classes whether it is online or hands-on is loaded with explanations and tips and is suitable for beginner to advanced potters.  She provides a variety of porcelain tips and compare them with regular pottery techniques. Her workshops are normally a mix between wheel throwing and hand building techniques. See Antoinettes Ceramic Workshops

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There are many myths about porcelain. This started already in the 12th century when Marco Polo discovered potters in China working with T'zu, the name originally used by these potters. In the 17th century, John Böttger began to understand the make-up of porcelain, and this is where our story starts. ​

The Understanding Porcelain online class explores the character of porcelain, and Antoinette explains how the materials used in those early ages of the discovery of porcelain are still the same materials used today, why it saturates with water so quickly, and why it dries faster than other clay bodies.
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Now, in the 21st century, we have much more knowledge about and many more resources to choose from as far as raw materials are concerned than was originally available in the City of Tinqui. It is also possible that potters can have a much clearer understanding of what we are dealing with in porcelain.​

During the 10 weeks that Antoinette presents her "Understanding Porcelain" online class, students can expect clear, close-up, and detailed videos that they can review and ask questions about as often as they need to. Antoinette teaches and demonstrates everything that any potter needs to understand about porcelain.  Whether hand building, throwing, trimming, or altering on the potter’s wheel, beginners to advanced potters will learn to work easily and successfully with the “Diva of clay”.   Antoinette addresses design. Porcelain is a semi-glass, which is the main reason why porcelain slump, warp, and crack. Firing and glazing techniques help to prevent mistakes and ensure success.​

The class is divided into weeks, which potters can follow or ignore. These are logical breaks between the videos and are intended to give potters an opportunity to pause and practice what they've learned. Potters can review 6 weeks of class content ( a 5-day hands-on class converted to 6 weeks online) over a 10-week period. They can review the content  as often as they need to, and they can discuss questions and gain assistance from Antoinette during this time. Potters watch the videos at their own time. There are more than 30 videos to work through, on average 7-15 minutes long. When the classes are over, the PDFs are available to download as handouts. 

In week 1, the class is designed to make a transition from stoneware or earthenware clay to porcelain. There are clear and specific differences in the approach between these clay mediums. The introduction, which includes some porcelain history and the origin of clay, prepares you for that. 

During Week 2, potters get to know and control porcelain with a pinching technique. This allows potters to understand the drying stages of porcelain clay. Porcelain clay, just like stoneware clay, comes in different kinds. Apart from different firing temperatures, porcelain clays are designed to either be thrown on the wheel, hand-built, or slipcast. In the end, potters choose a porcelain for their specific needs.  If you are unsure of which kind to choose, you can contact Antoinette. 

​Week 3 is a week of throwing porcelain on the pottery wheel. Beginners, intermediate, and advanced potters learn to push the limits on the wheel to throw thin, evenly, and translucent porcelain bowls and cylinders. The preparation of the clay is crucial, and the techniques include throwing with 2 kidneys, a great way to compress the clay and create even walls, a crucial element of success with porcelain. 

The right tools and the right drying stages will help potters during trimming of the pots. The final outcome of transparent porcelain is exciting, but to do it successfully requires knowledge. Potters learn how to trim smoothly and to eliminate unplanned marks that can show up in the translucency of the walls. Even walls prevent slumping and cracking of the rims.  During week 4, potters learn all about trimming and how to ensure the forms turn out successfully. 

​One of the myths out there is that porcelain is a difficult medium. Fact is, porcelain is the "Diva of Clay" that demands attention to detail. During this class, the whole course begins to fall into place, and students get to understand why it is needed to do things in a specific way.
However, one of the big takeaways is that there is no right or wrong way; only one that is comfortable and one that works. 

TeachingArt is among others, a Ceramic School where potters learn why certain things are done the way they are done. It is more than just demonstrations, but an in-depth study that is suitable to teach in college. The beautiful thing is that once potters understand, they can change the rules to suit their specific needs, and Antoinette is there to walk those ideas through and assist them. During week 5, potters learn to alter their porcelain vessels, taking design into consideration, and during week 6, the glazing and firing of porcelain are the final actions to ensure success with porcelain. With the right approaches, it becomes easy to obtain beautiful porcelain objects. 
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Antoinette shares a variety of clay techniques during her online and hands-on classes. The techniques that she uses are specialized, and she helps her students to develop their own techniques. Once a student of Antoinette, always one of her students. She is willing to work with you as long as you need it. ​​

Porcelain has long had the reputation of being a difficult clay body to work with. Much of this reputation comes not from forming the clay, but from understanding the firing process. Porcelain responds very specifically to heat and temperature, kiln design, glaze fit, and especially to the way it cools after firing.
By understanding the relationship between raw materials, firing temperature, and cooling cycles, potters can make informed decisions about kilns, clay bodies, and firing schedules that lead to strong and reliable porcelain work.
Now that we have to established the concept of porcelain and the distinctions between high-firing and low-firing types, and how to determine the appropriate kiln for your studio needs.

Working successfully with porcelain requires understanding more than just the clay itself. Firing temperature, glaze fit, cooling cycles, and kiln design all play critical roles in the strength and durability of the finished piece.
When potters respect porcelain’s need for controlled heating and especially slow cooling, they unlock the remarkable qualities that have made porcelain one of the most admired ceramic materials in history.