How to hollow a portrait sculpture for firing in a kiln

Once you do your portrait like this, the one thing you have to do for firing a clay sculpture is, probably at this point where it's not too finished, is hollow out and remove the frame or the armature from the sculpture. The way I'm going to do it might seem a little bit odd, but it's very simple. What you do is you take a wire like this, and you can make your own just using nuts. This is actually like a pottery wire, and what I tend to do is make a few cuts. So I'll take this sculpture, and right at the top of the skull, I'll just do a bit of a slice. So now I have this. I want to say I'm going to remove this, just kind of slide it up. The clay is pretty wet. You might want to wait until it's just a little bit better. So that's the top. I'm going to set that aside. For me, I'm going to use these wire end tools, and I'm just going to dig out a lot of this stuff around the armature. This clay is completely usable, so I always put it aside. And it's funny, you can see the various clays I've used, because one's got grog, one doesn't. And you want to keep like an inch of diameter, or like the thickness throughout, like you don't want parts to be too thin. You want to keep it consistent. One inch or more, 1.5 or so, is good enough. You don't want the parts to be extremely thick. That's going to get in the way, and it might cause cracks. You know, after a certain point, you'll be able to kind of lift it up. Even if you broke this part into bits, you should be able to get a big portion out. This is that one clamp. I'm just going to, I should be able to move it up. And we have the sculpture. This is what I have dug out of the sculpture. All of this is usable, and I'm going to use some right now. But what I like to do is, I'm going to take all of this clay and mush it together into one clump. That's going to make it easier to put together. Now I'm just going to take my existing sculpture, carefully put it here. You can see it's still missing the top of the head. And then I'm just going to make this nice and flat. So these are the last minute sort of touches that you can do. Clay is still kind of wet. And now, all of this, I can still remove a little bit of the clay if you want, but you don't need to because it's completely hollow throughout. That's the thing that you have to do for water-based clay, is make it hollow. And you just have to make sure it reaches the bottom. So because this is a study, I really don't want to spend too much time on it. This part is important. Remember the back of the head, or the top of the head? I have it here. And we can still get some clay off of it. So I'm just going to remove a little bit like this. But you want the edges to be nice and thick because I'm going to glue it onto here. And sometimes you do this and a hairline crack develops, but the secret is to get it really wet and create a slurry and put it down. And I'll show you how to do that in a minute. You basically just have to get it very wet, kind of put some texture in there so it becomes very stiff or becomes very loose. And so you can see I have plenty of space there. And I'm going to start at the base. I'm going to just put plenty of water here. And now I'm going to take my tool that's got a serrated edge that creates like little textures. And I'm just going to level all of this out. This creates texture. These little lines and all of this clay that's nice and wet. You can reuse it. So just get it really wet. Get it super wet. And then another thing that I do is I'll take a pointy tool like this and I'll create even more texture like this. This creates like a suction if you do it like this so it'll glue a whole lot easier. Like that. Just kind of cut these. You just rough enough this texture. This has to be like almost a slurry. And now I'm going to take the front part and I'm going to do the exact same thing to this. So you just create like a little threads here. You take your water. Get it really wet. I'll take this tool and I'll just do these lines. You still have to keep this really wet because you want the clay to remain wet while this dries just a bit. I don't know if that makes sense to you guys. So I'm going to put plenty of water. And now here's the trick. Putting it down and kind of pushing it. Push it but don't push it too much that you'll destroy the sculpture. There we go. There we go. So there's still a line in the head. You have to be very careful because this is why you want to keep it wet for now. You know I'm just kind of pushing where the seam is. I'm actually going to push it down quite a bit as I kind of rotate this around. You'll see the big difference. But I'm just going to keep pushing it. And I know that that line is there. So I'm actually going to push it even more. The clay that I removed that's really wet. I'm going to reuse that and put it as the clay. And after this dries out a little bit I'm just going to take a big tool and just kind of rake it. All right look at that. So as you can tell it's already starting to disappear. The seam is almost completely gone. And now at this point you have the option letting it dry or keep working on it. I'm probably going to put another few hours of work into this. And I always make my bases flat because I mount them right on a table. I don't want to be able to just have like a wood thing and do more additional work. Some sculptors actually like they'll put it pointy and then they'll mount it on a piece of wood. It looks very nice. But for me this is usually like where I like to leave it. And I'll take some nice soft clay and create a base like a flat base. I like heads that are not too big because I don't know about you but you know a portrait I think is more valuable to the individual. Unless I was doing something for somebody I would you know I would do it bigger. But yeah for portraits I don't really care about having a portrait really large in my house. And you know a real life portrait like a full-size bus weighs quite a bit. That's pretty much how you remove the insides of the sculpture. This if I wanted to leave it this way I could just take it to the kiln. Remember the first thing you have to do is let this dry probably for a few days at room temperature. There are people that dry it a little bit faster. They can put like a heat gun on it. I just let it dry. The thing to keep in mind is that when you are drying it you want to make sure that it's not developing cracks. You want to see if the base it's like moving in the base. Sometimes I'll come here pick it up. I'll move it to a different location. It is good to have air coming from the bottom. So if you have a drying rack that's really good for water-based sculptures. But I just wanted to show you really quick how I remove the insides of a portrait. It's actually the simplest way but the thing that I learned from just using the armature that I built in the last video is that perhaps I'll use thicker wire and just put it in the hole for the armature, the pipe, the flange, the steel pipe. I think that's better option and that's what I've done before. But I wanted to see if it would be a little bit more stable using the other wire. So I'm just going to clean this up. I'll probably continue working on this for a bit. But that's pretty much it for today's video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.