How to Make Clay Bisque Stamps For Adding Texture to Your Pottery

I am going to show you how I make bisque texture stamps. I think it's fun to have your own textures, even if they're similar to ones that you've already seen. Like, we've seen a lot of swirl stamps, but you can make your own swirl, like this one, which I made earlier today, and then it's your own version of a stamp that you've seen, you know, other people do. And the fun thing is, because this is leather hard already, I can actually test it out a little. So you just have to be careful you don't break it. And then you can see what the line quality is like. Oops. Squeeze it in there. And then I also have some bisque stamps I'm going to show you. Here's just a simple line design. And here's another one with little dots. See? It's good to wiggle these around a little. It's a lot easier to use on a slab, but you can certainly use them on a vertical form too. And here's one with just lines. And here, you can see them. So it's kind of fun, you know, this is like my own swirl, and then just simple line designs that I did. So I'm going to show you how I do some of these. The first, I do stamps in a few different ways. The first way, sorry about that arm, is using a ball of clay, starting with a ball of clay. I squeeze out a handle, and then I pat it down to flatten it out, and you can also kind of use your fingers a little if you want. And then you can shape this any way you want. You could do it in a circle, you could do a, how about we do a square. So you do a square, and then pat it down again to make sure you have a good shape. And then you can fiddle with it a little if it's not exactly what you want. And then what's fun is you can just use things that you have around the house. This, well, you might not have this around the house, but this was just a tube, a copper tube that I got at the hardware store. So I'm going to take it, and I'm going to put some line impressions in this clay. I'm going to wiggle it around a little so that I can get a nice deep line, and maybe I'll do it from this side also, but I think it'll only be two. Oh, that's fun. And then maybe we'll just do one on either, no, maybe not. Sometimes you need to stop and make on two dots instead. So if I take, I have this wooden stick, it's got a point on one end, but I'm going to use the flat end, and I'm going to go into the center of this here, and I'm going to push down and then wiggle it around so that I make a wide dot. It almost looks like a cranky face. So there you go. So that's kind of a fun square stamp that I made with soft clay. So you know, you don't really have to do anything all that complicated. I'll show you how I made the, this one, which I mean, you can probably figure it out, but so we'll do another one of these, right, soft clay, right, and round it out, flatten it out, make sure we have it flat. And then you could either do it with the pointy end or with the, with this end. So I'm going to use the pointy end. So I'm just going to wiggle around a little so that it's wider at the outside. And there we go. Maybe I even want to just do little ones in here inside the triangle, the triangle that was formed by the lines there. So it's like simple line. And then again, I'm going to make that little center dot because I like the way that looks. So that's a pretty simple stamp and it's your own and it's fun, kind of little, I don't know what you call this. And then you might just want to flatten it out a little. So in doing that, I did, I might want to go back and clean up some of those lines, maybe just make the impression again, there. Okay, so that's a simple line design that you can do in a stamp. Then I like to sometimes carve out a shape. So, oh, these are working with leather hard clay. So I made these stamps earlier today and I, actually, that one's partially done, so why don't we get one that isn't. So I've got here a leather hard, like kind of pre-leather hard stamp, and I'm going to make a, I'm going to make a leaf shape. So I'm going to just take my pin tool and I'm going to draw a leaf shape on here. Okay, so I've got this leaf and I'm going to take my knife and I'm just going to carve out that shape. It's kind of like cutting a hard cheese, smooth it out, the edges, that, and then I've got this tool with these from ZM. They have, you can get them from a few different brands. They have these little balls on the end and I'm going to just use it to make the vein line and then the leaf vein. And then maybe you want to have, you can really do this with a pin tool, whatever you have. I just wanted to give you some different examples. All right, so that's still, that's a little messy. What you might want to do is take a sgraffito tool so you can get a deeper line and you just, where your impression of your line was, you can go in there and then carve away. So what I find is I'll make a bunch of these things. Like if I wanted to make a leaf, I'll probably make multiple leaves and then test them out and see which ones I like best to use. So you can take these lines, clean them up a little with a stiff brush, smooth them out. Because remember, everything that's there is going to end up on your, you're going to see it in your clay, in your, on the slab when you press this in or on the cup or whatever. I actually like these leaf, I use them on mugs. I really have fun with this leaf impression. All right, just so, since this one is leather hard, let's try it out so you can see what it looks like. Just press it in. Again, be careful because you can break these and they also can be kind of sticky. Look at that. That's pretty cool. Nice leaf, huh? Okay. So then the last thing, I was thinking the other day that I don't really draw all that well, but I want it to do like a flower shape. So I came up with the idea of making like one of those little snowflakes, you know where you, sorry, I should have showed you that closer. So I started with a square piece of paper, right? I know this one's done already. And I folded it up like we did when we were kids and making little snowflakes. And then with a scissor, I cut out the shape and I opened it up and I had this little flower shape. So that's pretty cool. So I took one of these leather hard stamps and with a little bit of water to get it to stick down so I could draw the shape. This is just a damp sponge. You don't need a lot. You just want to stick it down just a little bit, right? This doesn't quite fit. There we go. Okay, so use a little water, stick it down and then I'm going to take my pin tool, right? And I'm just going to draw the lines around the piece of paper. If you decide you want to use a more permanent material, you could use like a craft foam or tar paper so that you can get a more permanent paper so you can use this again and again. But for me, for this purpose, just using the paper is fine. So it's hard to draw when I'm trying to get it all on camera. All right. Okay, we'll get this. And you can lift the paper up and you've got this line design now. And then with your knife, you can cut away. Okay. And you know, you can refine the shape a little after. Let's just get rid of the extra, the big amount of clay that we don't need. And I'll show you, I use a stiff bristle brush to clean this up or a sponge. So when I first started putting texture onto pots, I became obsessed with the MKM stamps, which I think are absolutely great. And I still do use some of them, but I do really like having my own texture too. So sometimes I actually combine them. I have a great MKM stamp that's a swirl that I really like to use. And I'll use it with other stamps that I've made myself. All right. So now we have, we can take the sponge and just smooth it out a little. And by itself, it's kind of not all that interesting. You want to do something more to this. Otherwise, you just have a flat stamp. So I'm going to take that tool again that I have, and I'm going to draw something on here. So let's see. What do we want to do? Maybe, well, I love a swirl. So I'm going to do a swirl first, do a big swirl. All right. And I'm going to, I connected it, and I'll show you why in a moment. And then I'm going to make petals that sit inside those petals. Right now, I'm just doing it kind of soft so that I can, if I screw up, I can rub it out still. Okay. So now we have this design. And then I'm going to take my Sgraffito tool, and I'm going to, using the lines that are there, I'm going to dig in deeper lines. The nice thing about the Sgraffito tool is it's narrow at the point and then wider, and so it makes a good line that, you know, when you're stamping with, you'll fill in with clay. So you want to be careful when you're doing this. I tend to rush things, but every line you draw on here is going to be on your, whatever you press this into. So you do want to take care and try to be as, like I already went off a little bit. That's okay. Try to be as careful as possible to get a good design. Okay. So let's see. Connect that there. And I'm not going to take you through this whole thing because that wouldn't be all that fun to watch, but I'll show you one that I did earlier that's done. So I'll go through and I'll carve out all those lines, and I'll take that brush and, you know, go through like this. Try to get a nice, good, you know, a damp brush until I'm happy with the way it looks. And I might even carve away little bits here if I think that there's too much clay there. So I have here one that I did earlier today. Where is it? Nope, that's not it. Oh, here you go. That's pretty nice. I'm really happy with the way it came out. This is the first time I tried this design, and it's pretty fun. So I highly recommend if you feel like you can't draw a design that you try cutting something out. You don't have to do it with the snowflake method. You could do any way that you wanted to cut a shape out and then use it as a template on your stamp. And the other thing is then it's repeatable, too. If you want to try different stamps and do different designs in here, you could do that. Which I think that's a really good thing to do, too, because you learn a lot each time you do it. And who knows? You may like your first one best or your last one. So that's how I do stamps. Just to review, I would start with a soft ball and press out the stamp with the handle. Handle is very important. Make sure it feels good in your hand. And then you can do things with just sticks or anything that you like to make an impression with. Here's a square thing. I've got this round tube. Did you see that square? I've got pieces of wood that I use to make an impression. That's kind of fun to do. And anything you can find around your house you can use. You could even use some of your own tools, your paintbrushes, whatever you have. And then some of these you can do when they're soft. And some of them you can make leather-hard stamps that you could then carve into, like we did with the leaf stamp, which was pretty fun. And then you can use these paper templates. So give it a try. It's a lot of fun. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.