Candle Luminaria #ceramic #decor #diy

Welcome to Ceramic Pottery and Sculpture Tutorials. Today I'm going to show you how to make luminaria. When we make these we're going to be talking about positive and negative space and also relief sculpture. Let's begin by making the form. To do that I'm going to use this mold. It's a four by four with the corners cut off. I'm going to cut a slab of clay. Holding the wire tight and up about an inch from the table. I want this piece to be longer so before I start rolling I'm going to stretch it by throwing it down against the table at an angle. If I want the piece taller I would throw it down against the table this direction. Now I'll take these two boards and set it on either side of the slab and take a rolling pin starting in the middle pushing away from me and then from the middle pull towards myself. To ensure that it doesn't stick to the table I just pick it up and flip it over every once in a while. If you're having trouble with your clay sticking to the table you can always roll on top of newspaper or cloth. I'm going to wrap this slab around the mold. I want two straight edges. I want a straight edge across the bottom and along one side. So I'll take the straight edge here cut it across the bottom and then along one end. Now I'm going to take newspaper and wrap it around the mold. I'm going to line up the end of this board with the straight edge of the paper. Holding the paper tight against the mold. I'm just going to cut off a little edge on one side on that straight edge side. Set the board down in line with the straight edge of the slab and pick this up and fold it over onto the mold and wrap the whole piece around the mold tight and overlap about a half inch and then stand it up on end. I'm going to push these two pieces together first and then with my fattling knife I'll smooth them out. Now this whole piece is going to go on the spare slab and I want to cut maybe a quarter of an inch bigger all the way around. I'm going to pull this extra clay up the side and as I do I want to be aware of the octagon shape of the mold. When I'm using my fattling knife or a rib pushing in and pulling up the sides I want to make sure that rib is in line with the sides. If it's in line with the corner it's likely to cut right through the clay and crack or cut the clay open at the corner. So I go around the bottom pushing in, pull up, push in and with my wooden rib I push in and straight up right in line with that part of the mold. I push in and straight up right in line with that side. You can spin your piece around a little easier when it's on newspaper. Now I'm going to straighten up all these corners by going back and forth either with the rib this way or with my fattling knife and bringing out those corners. Then I'm going to take the mold out and take the paper out and I need this to dry stiffen up to leather hard before I do any more to it. So I'm gonna take a piece of plastic and cover the top and let it sit like this for a while so that the outside has a chance to dry. If I don't have this plastic piece on top then this edge here dries very quickly and this area down here stays soft. But if I put the piece of plastic on top then the whole piece dries much more evenly. If I have a damp storage cabinet I can put it in there and leave it in there for a day. If not I could drape a bag over this piece loosely and that would allow it to dry slow. And that's all we do for the first day. This piece was done the other day and now the clay is leather hard and ready to be carved into. So the first thing I want to do is straighten this piece up. And I'm going to take a straight edge or a board and hold this piece of my hand this way and you notice that it bumps out around the bottom a little bit. So I'm gonna take this board and just paddle it on each of those sides. And I also want it to stand up straight. So if it's leaning one direction or the other I can just pick it up and tap it until it's standing up straight. The next thing I want to do is cut it an even height all the way around. And one way to do that is to take a ruler and measure. I'm going to actually make this quite a bit shorter. So I'm going to measure eight inches all the way around. And I can hold a straight edge here and mark those lines or I think I can just eyeball this. Now again for this to slide around I'm going to put it on a piece of paper. Alright if you have a turntable you can set it on the turntable and do that as well. The next thing that I want to do is clean up this rim. So if the rim is still not perfectly square I can turn this upside down and tap on the rim a little bit to square that up. And now I'm going to think about the design that I want to put in this piece. And the first thing I'm going to do is mark an area up from the bottom an inch all the way around. And then I'm going to flip the thing over and do the same thing around the top. And I'm going to keep my design in between these two stripes. And I do that for two reasons. All of these have areas above and below that are not a part of the design. One reason is aesthetics. It helps frame in your design by having a band around the top and the bottom. But the other is that it's functional. If you have a candle in here and wax is dripping off the candle it drips down into this area at the bottom and it acts like a cup and holds the dripped wax. Also having a nice thick rim around the top makes it much more sturdy and if it happens to hit against something else it's much less likely to break. Before we think about our design around the middle I do want to get this top finished. Right now it looks pretty rough because it's just cut with a fettling knife. So I'm going to go around and pinch by pushing in and down I can make the rim nice and round. And once I've gone around by pushing in and down then maybe I'll go around and smooth it with my fingers like this to finish up the rim. Now when thinking about how you're going to carve a design into this piece there's all kinds of things you can do. Here are just a couple of examples. This piece says falcons. So letters were drawn on each of the panels and as part of this design some of the areas are cut out entirely around the letters and some of the areas are carved in only part way. So after you cut out all of these pieces you don't want it to collapse or fall. A lot of people will leave the posts at the corners. So you see a post here and here. We have a design of peace signs in this one and a design of hearts in this one. And again the posts were left for that structural integrity. The one thing you do want to be careful about is not having pieces of clay cut really thin. If they're cut too thin you risk them breaking at those weak points. So be careful about leaving plenty of thickness in your design. Now you can carve out the image of something like a peace sign or a heart or you could use a random pattern like this. This one's very simple. You do that by starting with a line at the bottom of one post and then just come up and wave up and over two posts and you continue that all the way around the form. And then when you go to cut this out you cut everything but the lines. Now when you're cutting out these luminaria, these candle holders you want to start by cutting all the way around the top and then the middle. If I take this and I cut all the way down one side and then all the way down the next panel and then the next panel, by the time I get halfway around my candle holder the piece is going to collapse that direction. So we begin by cutting around the top. I'm going to cut right at the line at the top and bottom and I'm going to cut an eighth of an inch on either side of the diagonal lines. I'm leaving the posts and the diagonal lines. Once I've worked my way around the top then I'm ready to move around the middle and then finally around the bottom. Again about a quarter of an inch away from the diagonal lines and the post and right to the line across the bottom. Because I've removed all this mass up here by the time I cut away down here there's not a lot of weight that these posts have to hold up. Okay, now that I've cut all the way around the piece I'm going to put this in a bag and let it dry for a day or two before I continue cleaning this up. Right now it's still soft leather hard. I want it to be more of a stiff leather hard when I do the fine detail cutting. When you're considering your design for luminaria you're really considering both positive and negative space. The positive space is the actual clay itself and the negative space is the light that you see through the luminaria. So this piece will be put in a bag and given some time to stiffen up. This is another one I'm working on that has had a chance to stiffen up a bit and you can see the design is a little bit different. I want to think about how this piece is going to weave. So this stripe down here is going to go over, under, over, under. What I do here is take away a little bit of the clay on either side to give it that effect. I'm going over this two lines get carved in here and some of the clay on either side gets taken away. Then I'm going under here so some of the clay gets taken away here and on the other side. I'm going under this so here you can see it goes under and over and then back under here. So I'll take away some clay on either side here. And after I have gone around under, over, under, over then I start cleaning up these edges. You can see that sharp edge here and across the bottom down this side. This sharp edge here I can take off. And as I continue carving and working my way around this piece you can see how that's bringing out the weave. And I just continue cleaning up those sharp edges and your weave pattern comes out more and more. When I'm through carving the front side of the weave I'll come back and clean up the back side a little bit. Although I'm not too concerned about the back side because when I have a candle in here you're not going to see the back side. So I've got some more carving to do but again you can see it goes from drawn lines to sculpted lines. And that's relief sculpture. As I go I'm also removing those initial lines that I drew. And when you look carefully at this one you'll notice that it does the same thing with the diagonal lines going over the posts in the middle and behind the posts at the top and bottom. And the same is true for the peace sign and the heart. The peace sign sticks out a little bit in front of the posts and the heart does the same. When you're thinking about making luminaria there are all different kinds of designs that you can do on the outside of your piece. This one has kind of a random design. It looks a little bit like a cheetah print. When you're thinking about carving in your design you can make it letters. You can make it representational or abstract. I encourage you to go online and look at other examples of luminaria. Thank you for watching.