Silkscreen emulsion gives you a high contrast image or you need to use a
raster to reproduce the tones. Acrilic base often causes the glaze to curl
or fall off, so one needs to prefire the piece to a lower temperature first
in order to avoid that. One can rather use ceramic colorants ( oxides or
stains) to reproduce an image, fire it to a low temperature first and glaze
later. One can also use the emulsion as a resist and color or glaze around
the image. There one needs to think positive/negative. If one can use salts
instead of pigments, one can get "solarisation" effects or pictures in
several colors in one coating.
>Can I use regular gum as in gum printing?
Remember multiple coatings and registration problems ? It is all much more
difficult on clay. You will need a substance to carry color and dichromate.
Regular gum is often to thin for that, so make it much thicker. But
remember that you still need a very thin coating for the sake of the
exposure. The best is to spray, but remember the health hazards.
>>> WARNING: If you fire the piece yourself, make sure the kiln vents outside.
> The dichromate fumes given off can cause problems.
Only at the first stage, while the water vaporates. There are lots of other
hazardous things that vaporate from clay and glazes at that stage. It is
not healthy to keep your ceramic kiln under the kitchen table.
But all alt.processes can be applied to ceramics. Try to fire a regular
cyanotype, kallitype, silver nitrate. You will need to know a little more
about the ceramic processes and chemistry in order to achieve something
significant, but hopefully, for the purpose of a gift, you will be pleased.
It might go wrong too.
Regards and good luck.
Galina.