Pinch and Coil Skillbuilder: Adding Surface Design to the vases and bowls in Ceramics I

This video is going to show different ways to do applique for surface design for the pinch and coil vases and bowls that we did in Ceramics 1. I'm going to show applique, carving, slip trailing, and texturing. The first step is always to make sure that your form is actually quite clean. I like these little baby ribs, either the mud tool ribs or the ones that I made from hotel keys. You would just want to use those to scrape to get rid of your denting, sure form marks, just make sure it looks really, really clean. Now, if you have grog that is showing up, remember you can dip that rib in water to compress that grog back down again. Make sure your rims are smooth. If you need to add some water with your fingers, that helps to smooth them. So there, I'm just doing the final cleaning. Now, once it's clean, our first technique is going to be slip trailing that I wanted to show you. Slip trailing is very similar to if you're using frosting or you're icing something. I keep slip in a little squeezy bottle and I keep a piece of plastic in between the lid and the bottle, so you would just remove that plastic, shake it up vigorously. Now here, I'm going to lay out where I'm going to put the slip trailed lines by making a few little carved lines there. You can see when you squeeze it out, it comes out kind of thick like that, and I'm just going to go ahead and apply that on there. Now, if I make a mistake, I can just rib it off and start again, but by carving the lines a little bit, you know where you're going to be putting it. It helps with your accuracy a little bit more. Now, you have to be really careful not to handle the wet part, so I'm going to be setting this side to dry, and I'll come back and I'll get the other side that I couldn't get right now when it's a little bit drier. Next technique is applique. Now, applique, of course, is when you are applying clay to clay, so I'm going to make some balls here, so I'm rolling a coil and chopping the coil into even lengths. That will give me clay pieces that I can make balls out of, and they'll be pretty even in size. Applique, oh, there I'm using a towel to kind of put my bowl sideways so I don't damage it on the back side. Applique is when you score and slip two pieces of clay together, and they should always be of very similar moisture. If you have a leather-hard bowl here, I have some plastic clay. This is like a soft leather hard, so I put the scored and slipped surfaces together. Again, both surfaces must be scored, and I just slip one of them and then put that together, and there I'm just pushing it down because I want it to look a little bit like a flower, so I'm just going to go ahead and do that on the rest of them, scored and slipped on both. Again, your clay should always be of similar moisture because if they're very different, like if you put plastic clay on bone-dry clay, when they shrink, they're going to shrink at different rates, and then they will crack and fall off, so the most important thing is similar moisture. Here I'm going to use my stamp by rocking it. The next technique is going to be applique of a slab, so it's going to be very similar, but my one takeaway that I want my students to get is make thin slabs. Sometimes they make really thick slabs, and it looks kind of awkward, so here I've rolled a thin slab. I'm cutting out my shapes. I'm just smoothing out my surface before I do it, so again, nice thin slab, so it's real thin, like an eighth of an inch or so, and I'm cutting out my designs, and again, I'm just going to tidy up those edges just by kind of like smoothing the edges a little bit with my fingers. Now I'm going to mark where it's going to go, and I again have to score and slip. Both surfaces get scored, and usually you can slip either one or both, and here I'm just adding the rest. Now once I get it attached, then I have to press it on, make sure it's actually engaged. The scoring and slipping is really engaged, and then I'm going to clean it up with a small brush and water. That cleaning will help seal the edges, and it also helps to get rid of my tool marks or the score marks. Next technique is going to be carved design, so I'm just going to lightly lay it out with the needle tool, but I'm not really carving it with the needle tool because I want to carve it with the triangle tip tool. So we have those Kemper tools that I've shown my students before. I really like these miniature loop tools because they do such a nice job at removing the clay, not just pushing it. If you use one of these little loop tools to carve your lines, use the corner of it. It gives you a nice clean line that requires a lot less cleaning. So just like on this yellow cup, the carved lines I will fill with underglaze when I go to glaze it eventually, and that will keep my glazes from running together. For this next one, I'm going to do a little design like this. Now I'm using the little ribbon tool that's more like a rectangle on the end, not the triangle tip, and there I'm just carving my lines. Again, it gives you a nice clean line that requires very little cleaning. And the next technique is going to be some carved texture. I usually like to compare this for my kids. That blue bowl is what I'm going to be doing. It's a little scoop texture. This is like peeling a potato, like if you were to be holding potatoes. So I kind of use my thumb as the, I think maybe you call it a fulcrum, where I'm just kind of pulling toward my thumb. So it controls, I just have very small little motions where I'm carving it. All right, there's a carved texture. Next one is sculptural carving. So sculptural carving is a little bit different. It's like that blue cup I was holding where I'm taking off a little bit more, and I'm going to make it a lot more three-dimensional, not just lines, but I'm actually going to kind of sculpt it a little bit more. So I, once I have my original lines, then I'm going to take that triangle tip tool and I'm angling it, and I want to feather the edge out. So I'm really kind of creating an up and down, a much more sculptured surface. Here I'm feathering out the edge. I want to just try to smooth that and make that transition from carved line into the body nice and clean. Once I've feathered it with the tool, then I clean it with a little wet brush. Now I'm going back and adding the rest of the lines that I wanted to on that slip trailing once it's dry. And I also will be pushing down some of the sharp points. So some of the dry areas have little pointy ends. Those will end up by being sharp. So what I just want to do is just take my finger and push those back down. That will allow me to have a surface that's not real sharp and pointy. Now when you're done with the slip trailing, always clean the tip out with a brush at the sink. Just go to the sink, clean that out really well. You're going to replace the plastic on the bottle that keeps it from drying out. So there, now my tip is fully clean. You want to clean it. Don't leave it dirty for the next person. You need to clean that. And then screw it on over the plastic and then I just put that little tip on. And now I'm going to stamp again. And again, you just rock that stamp to get it to work really well. And on the bottom, make sure that you are identifying your pieces. And if you do have an area where maybe your pot rocks, you can take a little tool and create a small indent. We've done this previously, but that helps if you're, if the pot bottom is not fully level by creating an indent. It definitely helps. And then here I'm just going to stamp one more time in the middle of my little flower. And that is how the different ways of surface design, whether it's applique, slip trailing, carved texture, carved lines, or sculptural carving. Hopefully that gave you some idea, kids, and you can have fun with your pieces.