Mason stains are powdered ceramic pigments made from metal oxides and other colorants. They’re designed to stay stable through firing and can be added to slips, glazes, and clay bodies to create consistent color.

You can wedge Mason stains directly into moist clay or you can blend them into liquid clay. Read more on the blog →

It depends on how strong you want the color to be! A good starting range is:

1-3% for pastel colors

5-9% for middle hues

10–15% for saturated color

 Download my color guide for details on how to calculate this percentage.

Yes! The whiter the clay body, the more vibrant the colors will be. You can also use off-white and tan clays which will give a more desaturated color.

You can use any temperature clay to make colored clay. Mid and high fire clays will give you more vibrant color.

Pinks, purples and greens are notoriously fussy in a clay body. They likely will burn out. To work around this issue, we use stains and blends of stains that we know work in clay. Here are our tried and true recommendations:

Pinks: Use a red stain at a small percentage (1 - 3%)

Purples: Use a blend of red and blue. Try different ratios for different hues.

Greens: Most green stains will turn brown or gray in a clay body. The three greens we have know do well in clay bodies are: Bermuda 6242, Chartruese 6236 and Avocado 6280. For different hues of green, use a blend of yellow and blue at varying ratios. Praseodymium 6450 or Canary 6410 and Zirconium Vanadium Blue 6319 make a really pretty leaf/pea green.

Yes, colored clay is food safe. Ceramic stains are fired to an extremely hot temperature and are inert. They are also not soluble in a glaze or clay body so there is no concern with them leaching.

For scientific evidence, please look up William M. Carty and Hyojin Lee’s article “An

Overview of Glaze and Glazing Safety”. One of the authors, Dr. Carty, is the head of Ceramic Engineering at Alfred University.

Ceramic stains are microscopically large particles that are not soluable in water. They are not able to be absorbed by the skin. However, like any dust or particulate, they should not be breathed in, so appropriate respiratory protection, like a P100 filter, is required.

Store your colored clay like you do regular clay. Each color should be wrapped in plastic so it doesn’t dry out. You should also label each color.

Managing lots of colors can be a pain, so we usually try to make close to the amount of clay that will be used that day or the following day. This may seem difficult, but as you build your confidence, it will become part of your work rythm in the same way a baker prepares sourdough in advanced to be baked the following day.

Any scrap that is left over is placed in its own labeled container, by color, and left to dry out and reprocess when needed. We have found that managing dry clay is easier than keeping many different and varying amounts of moist colored clay.