Pottery Tutorial- Applying a Laser-print Iron Decal

In the first ever Pottery People video, I'll show you how to apply an iron decal to a piece of glazed and fired pottery, and give you a few tips to make the process easy and successful.

The printers you can use to print your own iron decals at home are ANY HP or Canon Black Toner Only Laser Printer. The regular toner in these 2 brands have a high enough iron content to make decals. InkJet black ink will not work. I use an HP LaserJet P1102w and it has always worked well but is quite old.

My favorite brand of decal paper is Fired-on Images Laser Printer Image Transfer Kit. The paper is the best I have used and comes with a very detailed and helpful user guide. I order from The Ceramic Shop. Here's a link! https://www.theceramicshop.com/brand/...

Here is an excerpt from their guide with step by step directions for printing:

"To print your image:
1. Set printer to "Plain Paper" standard U.S. size 8 1/2" x 11". If the toner smudges or prints too lightly change the paper type preference to "Heavy Paper"

2. Run a few sheets of plain paper through the printer to warm up the printer roller.

3. Remove tissue protective covering from your decal paper before printing.

4. Place transfer paper into the manual feed slot if your printer has one. Otherwise just put it in where your printer paper regularly feeds in. Only put in one sheet at a time.

5. Print your image onto the glossy side of the transfer paper"

NOTE: The terms "water slide decal paper", "decal paper", and "transfer paper" are all used interchangeably here/in this video.