I Got a Rock: Actually, 4 of Them

Four different rocks, four different methods:

  1. Paint a rock, then burn off the paint.

  2. Put tape on a rock. Burn out a stencil. Paint. Remove stencil.

  3. Etch a rock with engraving settings.

  4. Melt a rock into glass with cut settings.

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The cuts and engraves are amazing, just came back from a pebbly beach last week and wish I’d brought some home now.

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Nice demo of the different techniques!

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This is great, I’m wondering what other techniques might apply here?

Stencil/sandblast

Stencil/chemical etch

Multiple paint layers/engrave to reveal different colors

Norton method of dark engraves/cermark

Hmm I’ll bet there are others…

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Thanks for sharing your experiments. You did more than scratch the surface of this topic.

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Oh also I wonder how this would work on stone:

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Love these!

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These are all worth a shot…

One of my earliest thoughts about what to do with a Glowforge still six months before mine arrived…

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Did you ever explore it?

I have not had the materials yet. I was all set to do a class in ceramics at USF this winter and then…

I’ve been running around for better than a week looking for pottery glaze to try on metal and rock. I have some artist friends that work in clay sometimes but didn’t want to ask them for any. There used to be pottery classes at every strip mall in town.

What you would need is not found in most such pottery shops. The ideal stuff you might find from a friend that does a lot of raku. The clay body especially needs to stand up to heat shock which raku does well and “paint-a-frog” (my word for them) shop talc clay is about the worst. Also the glazes, while low temp, often have chemical issues that would break down under a laser.

A genuine fine arts clay shop is what is needed. there is one in Western Orlando that even the group in Miami had to go to, but it was sold to someone else some years ago, I believe they are still in the area though,

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Is that the horse hair pottery? I know that both of them have mentioned raku. What about porcelain? I used to play with jewelry and lapidary and my “mentor” was alway making porcelain necklaces and earrings.

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Basically Raku is heated to the top temp and then tossed into various cold materials like straw that provides a lot of cold shock and even Raku often breaks. For that reason the whole formula focuses on surviving such shocks.

Real porcelain works at very high temperatures and thus is much lower in porosity, the overcoming of that was the original point of glazes originally. The other extreme is so porous you can fill a jar with water in the desert, and the water flowing through and evaporating is used to cool the water.

I would love to have the trick work in porcelain clays as they are far more “simple” and strong, but they might not hold up as well to heat shock. There are also technical ceramics little different from porcelain but higher density.

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