Working with Clay
- 1. Sculpting With Clay Creating 3D Works of Ceramic Art!
- 2. What is clay? A fine-grained, firm earthy material that is plastic (malleable) when wet and hardens when heated. It is used to make ceramic art.
- 3. Brief History of Ceramics The earliest piece of pottery, Venus of Dolni Vestonice, dates between 29,000 and 25,000 BC. Found in an area of what is now the Czech Republic. Chinese pottery dates back to 10,000 BC. Between 6000 and 4000 BC the potter's wheel was invented in Mesopotamia.
- 4. Types of Clay Earthenware - the most commonly found clay in nature and is the raw material usually used to make most of the pottery in the world. Stoneware - clays are named this because when fired they have the characteristics of stone, which is a hard, dense surface sometimes with a variegated grayish brown color. Porcelain - the product of different techniques of many early Chinese pottery workers. Its main ingredient is kaolin, also know as china clay.
- 5. Boxwood tools - Tools provide enough texture and sharpness to shape clay properly Wire Clay Cutter - useful in cutting large lumps of clay. without causing deep gouges or other problems with the clay. Needle - one of the most versatile tools in pottery - just a few of their uses are for scoring slabs and coils when hand building. Brushes - used to carry water and slip to specific areas when you are working the clay, as Loop, Ribbon, and Wire Tools - handy for trimming well as used to paint greenware. and design with slips, underglazes, and Ribs - can help shape and smooth pots. overglazes.
- 6. Techniques - Wedging Kneading clay to distributing the moisture evenly, eliminate hard spots in the clay, and force out air bubbles. Properly wedged clay is very smooth, with an even texture.
- 7. Techniques - Score and Slip To score clay, you hatch small groves/lines into the edges of the piece. A slip is a suspension in water of clay and/or other materials used in the production of ceramic ware. In order to attach two wet pieces of clay, you have to score both sides with a needle tool and then apply slip and mush them together.
- 8. Heating Finished Pieces Kiln - A special oven used for firing clay. Fire - Means to heat the clay in the kiln. There are two rounds of firing: Bisque Firing - the initial round of firing that hardens the clay (16-18 hours). Glaze Firing - the firing that is done after coating the hardened clay with clear or colored glazes.
- 9. States of Drying Plastic - Clay in its moist state. Leather-Hard - Clay that is rigid, but not yet dry. Greenware - Unfired clay. Bone Dry - Clay objects which have completely dried after firing. Bisque-ware - pottery that has been fired but not yet glazed.
- 10. Decorating Your Work Glaze is a glassy coating on pottery, the primary purposes of which are decoration and protection. One important use of glaze is to render porous pottery vessels impermeable to water and other liquids.