Clay Pinch Pottery Tutorial

Pinch pots, the place where all ceramics courses begin. First thing to do when making a pinch pot is to cut yourself off a solid block of clay. And I'm not going to just grab it with my hand, I'm going to take the wire tool and cut myself off a chunk. I may have to cut off more than I actually need to keep the block in a regular form. So I'll cut that and then cut it in half. And that's the piece I'll work with. Always be sure to re-wrap the clay as soon as you're done cutting your pieces off. Starting with your solid block of clay, you're going to tap it against the wear board to form the basic shape that you wish to start from. Pinching is very intuitive and you can start from whatever base form you like and end up with whatever form that you wish. So I'm going to show you here how to start with a round sphere and make basically a pot that I then alter to be a more irregular form. There's no rule that says you have to start with a sphere. If you want to end up with a rectangular pot, then maybe consider starting with a square piece of clay. Either way, you just need to be sure that that starting piece of clay is solid and avoids any crevices or inconsistencies that could cause you trouble later. Watch for these creases here because those are places where you could introduce weaknesses like air bubbles or just weaknesses in the folding of the clay that could cause cracks and thin spots in your pot later on. You want to smooth those out as best you can. The little micro crevices and stuff, those are fine. It's just the bigger places where it's folding over on itself that you want to look out for. Okay, and then you can also roll your piece on the wear board and give it a nice bottom like that. Okay, so the first thing is to open it up with your thumb. Now, I'm not going very deep. I'm just pressing in and rotating. So press, rotate. This is where you're going to set your rhythm for the whole pot. You're going to press or pinch and rotate. And you only rotate enough to overlap the thumb or the pinch print by half. So you're not rotating over here and pressing in over there and there because you're going to get these inconsistencies in between your thumbprints. So you want to overlap the thumbprint by half so you're seeing a more even consistency. Okay, and I don't want this little mountain in the middle to keep going. So I'm going to make sure my thumb is actually hitting the interior of the form. So pinch, rotate, pinch, rotate, pinch. I think I'm about half an inch from the bottom or about a finger's width from the bottom of the wear board. So here we are. Nice and thin on the bottom. Good thickness there. Very thick walls. So what we're going to try to do is move all of this clay on the outside up. We're going to have a nice even walled form coming out from the base. So we're going to put it back together. To do that I'm going to score and slip. But in this case just get a little water and score. Now you will not be cutting your pot in half. Obviously you want to just keep your pot whole because any time you cut it apart you could, you know, you're just making more work for yourself. But if you want to make one, the first one, just to try, you could cut it in half and just see where your thicknesses are. So I'm going to be pretty rough with this because I'm going to smooth it out later. So I just want to be sure that it's really well connected again. Okay. So now back, now I'm going to pinch at those points where there's a lot of thick clay and I'm going to pinch and rotate. Same deal. My fingers are down underneath that bottom edge of the pot right against the wear board. My thumb is right down along that outer corner of the bowl with this pot. So this hand is really not doing much. It is just hanging out. Okay. And we're going to do like maybe two laps of that. Okay. So now where are we at? Now we have a nice thin section right here at the base. That's the right thickness. So we've moved that clay up already from where it was. It moved up. That's awesome. So we're going to keep moving that clay up and we'll get a pot that's somewhere up here. Okay. So that's where the finger has been pinching right there, touching the wear board and the thumb is right there. Next, we're going to move it up to here and we'll just keep going up, but we need to go all the way around the pot. Okay. So now I'm going to be just slightly up off of the base of the wear board. So now it's the same idea. Pinch, rotate, pinch, rotate. And you try to have a consistent pressure with each pinch so that you don't get a thin spot where you pinch really hard and then a thick spot where you kind of slacked off on your pinching pressure. You want to have it just nice and consistent. Okay. One lap around there. You can see it's starting to crack. So I'm going to get my finger just wet, no sponge, just a little bit of water. So here I'm pinching and bringing together to thicken that rim, stabilize it so it doesn't keep cracking like that. This is just to stabilize that upper rim, thicken it up a little bit. So it's not trying to flop around. Okay. So we pinched slightly above the wall or above the wear board now. So what you see is an almost consistent wall now. You've got a little bit of a thickness up here at the top and we'll be able to continue to thin that out. But it's also flaring out here more than I'd like. And maybe I want it to be more of a vertical form. So, and come up straighter. So I'm going to actually start to kind of collar it in is what we would say. So now I'm going to take my two hands. I'm going to be pinching and bringing together down on the side of the wall. So just like I was doing up here, I was pinching and bringing together. I'm going to be doing that now, pinching and bringing together. But I don't want it to fold out like that too dramatically. So I'm going to be a little bit more gentle than that. But the same thing, pinch, bring together, rotate, pinch, bring together, rotate. So it's when I pinch, it's thinning it. When I bring it together, it's tightening it. And then I rotate onto the next section. So I'm thinning it. I'm bringing it higher. And I'm working that all the way around. So I don't want any of these creases. So if you get any creases, maybe, maybe you need to back off of that step where you're bringing them together. Let's thin out the walls a little bit more. So I'm going to be working down to the base. And I'm just going to be thinning by pinching, pinch and rotate. And then I'm moving up the sides. So pinch, bring together. But now I'm focused more on just the pinching. So just the pinching with a slight squeeze together is going to thin the walls out and bring them up at the same time. Crack there, I've got to seal that up. Notice I haven't used any water except for that one time to smooth the rim out again. So you don't want to be introducing any water unless it's absolutely necessary, because it's going to weaken the clay. The wetter the clay, the less it wants to stand up. And the more it's going to try to fall over and sink down on you. So now I'm actually working the upper rim. If you have a low spot on the side, try doing it a squeeze, pinch and squeeze to bring up that height. So if you got a low spot, pinch and bring it together and work that clay back up. Okay, so now we have a nice thin wall piece. It's vertical, a little bit of a thin spot there, a nice thick up on the rim. That gives us options of how we want to shape the rim. And we've got a decent amount of clay down here, but you could always thin that out even a little bit more. Or maybe bring it down and give it a foot. Maybe this part is going to be something more like that. Or, you know, if you want to angle it to the inside, something like that. But now we have options. That's great. But you can see how much is distorting now. It's very flexible. So that's my sign. I've got a thin wall, and I've got really floppy clay now, because it's so thin, and it's still wet. That's my sign to take a break, let it stiffen up, and come back to it later when it's a little bit more firm. So I'm going to just seal these two parts back together, and I'll walk away. I'm going to set this aside. If you want to come back to your work later and have it be stiffer, you want to let it dry. So you don't want to wrap it too tightly with plastic, but you don't want that top edge to dry out. Before you walk away, give that just a spritz of water with your finger. Just a little bit. Remember, no water in the center. And actually press these down right around the rim, and that water that you just spread on there is going to hold it in place. So that is going to let this dry really efficiently without the top edge drying out. You can see here, this is if you want it to stiffen up quickly, but still have the top rim workable. This is if you're going to walk away for several hours or a day. This is still going to dry out a little bit. It's still going to evaporate through the little cracks in the plastic, but it should be workable even tomorrow. This one, I'll want to come back within an hour or two and keep working and refining the surface. Okay, it's been about an hour, and this piece is still very flexible. This piece, with just the rim wrapped, is quite stiff, except for the rim up here. So down here, I can move this around, and it doesn't really flex. It does a little bit, but it doesn't flex nearly as much as that one right there. So now is a good time to refine the form and thin it out. If you need to thin out any thick areas, like down here at the base, this needs some work here. So you could reach in with your hand here to support, and then pinch around this bottom edge here to give us a foot. You can see where my cut lines are still showing up, so maybe all that scoring and slipping wasn't quite enough. But now is a good time to address that bottom, because the top half is stiffened up, so I can actually flip it upside down without it breaking or kind of warping too much. Okay, so I don't know, maybe you do some interesting form up here as well. But you can do the same process of pinch and rotate to thin out this foot and make it stand up a little taller off the table. Notice, though, that you're going to be forcing that bottom back into the bowl. So if you want a smooth form on the inside, or something that's going to drain water nicely, then you'll want to push that back down. And now is maybe a good time to start addressing the surface as well. So if you wanted a smooth pinched surface, all you got to do is just keep doing that same process, just thinning out the thick sections, thumb smoothing that. If you want to smooth it out even more, you could take your metal rib or one of these rubber ribs, and you can actually start using this as a shaping tool, as well as a surfacing tool. So, you know, supporting on the inside with the hand, and then running the smooth edge of the rib on the outside, you're able to get a much smoother surface there. It's not perfect, so you could spend some more time working it. Of course, you could use your serrated rib to give it a texture, and the rubber rib just to show you what these are like. You know, they're nice for that smoothing step, too, just like the metal rib. The smooth edge of the metal rib is fine. So the angle matters. If you're smoothing, you want to have it right up against the side of the form like that. If you're out here perpendicular, you know, you're actually going to be scraping. And so you can see here, the scraping is pulling out that grit and the grog. It's making streaks through the surface. The smoothing, where you're angling it more along the surfaces, is working nicely there. So it's quite a different move, whether you're, you know, smoothing along the edge of the pot versus scraping up the side. Very different. Okay, but now is also a good time for shaping. Say, you don't want a round pot. Not everyone needs to make round pots. There's plenty of other shapes out there. So once it's stiffened, you don't want it very stiff. But if it's just sat for, you know, 30 minutes to an hour, I'm outside, so the wind is blowing, the sun is shining, everything is drying really fast. But if you're in a basement or somewhere, maybe it's going to take a little longer. But you could still work the form really nicely and maybe give it something a little more interesting of a form. So, you know, you could indent it, you could fold it in. But now is a good time because it's still flexible, but it's stiff enough that it's not trying to fall apart every time you touch it. So maybe we make it symmetrical. I don't know. Maybe not. But yeah, once you get the general form you want, it's maybe something more interesting, then you can go back and refine it. So that's why we kept this upper rim soft is because it being the most exposed section, it tends to dry from the rim down to the foot, just based on airflow in this environment. So if you want it to dry evenly, you got to wrap the rim and protect it, keep it wet. And then that's naturally going to counteract the drying system. Okay, so I'm going to keep stretching this clay out, little ribs into the section. If you want to give it, you know, like facets, something like that. And then once we've got it refined, generally, we'll let it dry even more and then come back and do some surface work. Don't forget to keep your top rim wet and to wrap your piece whenever you're not working on it. Okay, so I had to walk away from this for a couple hours to do something else. So I wrapped it up really tight with several layers of medium or lightweight drop cloth. And I left the beginning layers of these coverings on as well. So these should still be almost the same moisture content that they were when I left them, because I had multiple layers of plastic. So what I wanted to come back to show y'all is how you could, you could take the idea of pinching and make any kind of form you want. There's no reason that we have to make round pots. And even if you're somebody who wants to get into figure sculpting, or something really complex in terms of form, like that, then you could use the pinching method as the way of getting a basic shape, and then go into altering later. Now, there's plenty of other ways to work with clay. But pinching is just like this very accessible, like meditative and enjoyable way to work with clay. So, so you can see this top edge is still quite soft, because we added that extra water and wrapped it up really well. So the first thing I do when I unwrap something is just kind of check the stiffness of it. Is it is it still as soft as I want it? Or did it harden up a little bit over time? It seems like we're maybe just slightly stiffer than when I left, but not too bad. So I'm going to kind of watching these cracks here. And I'm just going to repair those by kind of squeezing and pinching over them. So that's something you kind of constantly have to do. Depending on your clay, this clay is really groggy. And so it's going to try to crack a little bit more like that than than your clay probably will. But that's something that that you just need to watch as you work. Not letting those surface cracks turn into bigger openings. Okay, so we can kind of we have that thick rim, which is really great, because now it gives us those options, like I was talking about, how we could really add some accents to the form, just by, you know, addressing that lip, addressing that rim flare, whether it curls in or out, or both in this case, in different places. And if that is cracking, like over here, it's giving me some small cracks as I work that. They're opening up more and more. So if that's happening, you know, dab a little bit of water on there, and really pinch and squeeze that back together. Smooth those out before they become worse. You'll probably notice as you add that water, you can take a wet finger or your small sponge with a little moisture. And you can, you can really smooth the surface of clay out. And it'll kind of cosmetically address those cracks. It doesn't, doesn't actually repair cracks, just adding water like that. But it can lead to a nice smooth surface. However, it can also be a little counterproductive. Because with the sponge, you can see here, as I sponge away, more and more of the grit is coming up to the surface. You can see that grit right here is just a little bit more pronounced because the sponge is taking away the smaller particles and revealing the larger ones. So you'll actually get a smoother surface working by hand, because your hand isn't going to be brushing away the smaller particles as much as the sponge would. And you can kind of press those larger particles of grit back into the clay. So there you go. It's not perfect, but good enough for demo work. And this side is a little stiff. So there might have been maybe a hole in the plastic or something. So I'm going to try not to work that too much. Once, once the clay is stiff, it's, it's going to be more prone to cracking if you try to force it into different shapes. So I'm not going to try to change the shape as much as just give it a little accent right there. Yeah, this whole side is much stiffer. When it's stiffer, we can really work on the surface nicely. So you can see here, there's still some texture from the serrated rib that I was going to come back and smooth out. So I'm actually going to take one of my rubber ribs. If you don't have a rubber rib, metal rib is going to work just fine. Or you can even use a wooden rib. This, because we're not really trying to scrape the surface. This is a wooden rib. We just want to actually smear some clay around on the surface and get it smeared into those little crevices to smooth out the low spots. So I'm supporting on the back side and just with the rib at like a 45 degree angle, kind of compressing that surface. That's taking on a bit of a concave form. But you can see that's already, you know, starts to look almost like a slab piece, slab built piece. Like it's a flat plane there. It's coming up. Okay, so I'm going to do the same on this side. A little water on the surface is fine. Actually helps the tool slide across. And it helps actually loosen some of the smaller particles up, which allows you to move them across the surface so that they fill in the crevices. Okay, and then you can see you got this kind of fin in the middle. So if you want to clean that up, you just come back and forth a couple times. You can take the metal rib, really shallow angle, and a nice crisp edge there. Great. So that's not so bad. That's pretty smooth. Right? If that's what you're going for. If you want to leave a pinched texture, that's great too. There's a lot of people who get really into that kind of warped looking surface, something that shows your process. So it's kind of your personal preference there. I am going to take the sponge and we got to address this foot because this is ugly. It's got it's got cracks. It's a little bit too stiff to really move around efficiently. Added a bit too much water there. So I'm going to dab that off. But you got to do something with this. So let's see. It's pretty stiff. I can still move it a little bit with that extra water. So maybe I'll try to coax it into more of a square shape. That's all I'll do. But here where it's trying to split, it's trying to split on me right there. So I'm going to pinch and force that together. I'm going to try to flare out those corners and maybe a little spot halfway through. This one is a big split back here. That's where I cut it in half before and now it's coming back to haunt me. So you can see that crack right there. If you got a bad crack like that, say from cutting your pot in half, then you're going to need to actually do something more extreme like score and slip in the crack. Now I don't need to actually add slip to this because I just added water to the surface of the clay. So there's actually slip forming on the surface of the clay itself. So I just need to do some good scoring. Make sure that those parts are going to knit together like a zipper almost. And then really pinch and force those two parts together. Give it a lot of force in the bringing together. And then just dab up the surface. Make sure that's solid there. And then let's just see how that sits on the table before I get too far ahead of myself. Not so bad. This part of the lip really took a dive on me. But not so bad. The inside is still okay. So you can just tap it on the table a couple times to give it a flat surface. If that's what you want. You could also consider you know taking a knife and doing like a scalloped foot. So you could cut away sections to lift the form up off the table a little bit. With something like that. Not a huge difference but sometimes that can be a really nice elegant touch if you're looking for something elegant. And you know you could cut away at multiple scallops. Multiple points there. And just take a little more off of that side. And you can see where I've cut it's quite gritty. But where I've pinched it's kind of a smoother surface. So that's kind of an advantage of pinching and working with your hand as opposed to a sponge. Or smoothing as opposed to scraping with the rib. Is to kind of force that grog back down into the clay. So it doesn't come to the surface and make it rough. So I'm just going to smooth that out a little bit more. See if I don't add water and I just use my finger I can get a pretty smooth surface. If I start to add water that's what removes the small particles makes it rough. That's looking good. It doesn't sit flat. You know you can try to address that now. And then just do your final shaping here. And you're done in terms of forming. Now you can always continue to refine this. And as it dries you'll be able to push harder on the surface and smooth more aggressively. And you can you can continue doing that as many times as you want until you get the surface you are looking for. Sometimes it's nice to leave a little texture though. And kind of leave those marks of your process. Leave the marks of the clay in your fingers. But that's a personal preference. So you'll have to decide when enough is enough. I'm going to go ahead and do another round of refinement because I don't think I'm quite finished yet. I'm not satisfied with the piece as it is. So I'm working on a foam slab and I'm going to take a wooden knife and just go in and clean up and accentuate all of the little details that I want to come through on the piece. Starting with this little crevice I'm just pushing the knife in. Notice I'm not dragging the knife. I'm using it more like a stamp almost to press in on the surface of the clay. And that's giving me a cleaner line of no jagged edges that you might get those jagged edges if you were to draw the knife across the surface. Here I'm adding in additional clay and kind of pushing a little bit of clay. Pinching it out into a rib. It's sticking out of the side of the pot. And I'm just refining that line of the rib. Making it nice and clean and straight. Not too lumpy. And here I'm taking the butt end of the wooden knife, the rounded end, to give a little crease near the lip of the pot. And again I'm using it like a stamp. I'm not dragging it across the surface of the clay. But instead just pressing it in to give a clean line there. The lip and the foot of a pot tend to be the places where your eye goes to first. So it's really important you take the extra time in your refining steps to accentuate those lines on the foot and the rim. Here I'm working on the other side of the rim. This kind of demonstrates the usefulness of that foam slab. Because I can turn the pot around in this refining stage without worrying about damaging the part that I just refined. So if you have a foam slab that's a handy thing to work on. Otherwise any cloth will work. So here I am noticing a small crack in the rim. But as I open that up and try to patch it, I'm noticing that crack goes much farther down than I want. And I think that that's a remnant of me cutting this piece in half during the building process to show you the wall thickness. So I'm going to do a lot of work now in this stage to make sure that this comes back together and doesn't persist through the drying process. If I were going to fire this piece, I would be really concerned now that this crack is going to show up after I fire it as the clay shrinks. So I'm going to do a lot of work here. I can still save this, but I need to be sure that I really address the entire crack. And I'm starting with the scoring tool here. Scoring really deeply on both sides and scoring down past the end of the visible crack. So scoring into the part of the pot that looks like it's still bonded together. And I'm dipping my scoring tool in the water bucket to kind of create a slip on the surface of the pot as I score. And so I'm going to just take some time to really work that. It seems counterintuitive, but sometimes it's helpful to open those cracks up farther than they already are just to allow your tool to get in there and really score deeply. But now I was satisfied with the scoring and I got enough slip built up on the surface by using just a couple dabs of water from the bucket. Now I'm pushing it back together, pinching it and compressing it and just making sure that it's really stuck as best as I can. I'm going to work this back and forth. Notice I'm pushing from both sides with my fingers. So the clay is really forced towards the other part. And then that particular part is a little bit wetter than the rest of the pot now. So I just want to kind of clean up the mess, but then I want to move away and not work on that part for a little while, let it dry and set up. Okay, now I've flipped the pot upside down and I need to refine the foot a little bit further. Like I said a minute ago, the lip and the foot are the two places where your eye goes to first on a pot. And the same goes for sculpture as well. The edges and the profile really attract the eye. So I'm going to refine the points of the foot similar to the way I did on the on the lip. In this case, that line of the rib down the wall of the pot kind of disappears just above the foot and then the foot is kind of a mushy form. It's not as defined. So I'm going to add in a little piece of clay, just a little coil to give myself enough clay there to continue that rib line all the way down. So you can do this in many different ways. Like you can add on additional parts of clay to your pinch pot after it's in this almost leather hard phase. To do that, you just need to be sure to score and slip really well on the surface of the dry piece. For the coil, I'm pulling clay directly out of the bag so it's still quite wet and it's easy to manipulate. It's easy to push into that scored section. So I don't actually need to score too much on the wet clay coil. I just need to score the surface of the drier pot to give it some tooth to bond to. But you can see that that now is giving much cleaner line directly from the lip down to the foot. So it's much more defined form than I had just a minute ago. Now you can also work the surface. A lot of times our pinch pots have that pinched lumpy texture and that might be the right thing for your pot and for the piece that you're making. But sometimes that becomes just a default that people rely on because they don't want to do the work to refine the surface. A lot of artists rely on the kiln and glaze and firing process to provide a rich surface on their pieces. But since we're focusing on greenware in this class, we need to develop the skills to be able to have a really refined piece in the greenware stage. So that's going to give you some advantages if you do go on to take a ceramics course with kilns and I think there's some really amazing options that are available to us just using wet clay. So in this step I'm just using the same process that I did in the previous refining step using a serrated rib to smooth out the lumps and bumps in the pinched surface and then I'm going to go back in with a little bit of water on a smooth rib like a metal rib or rubber rib and that's going to polish it up and give you the smoother surface that you see on the left hand side. Now there's a lot of other surface treatments that we could talk about later including like stamps and textures, burnishing and other processes like that. Okay so here we are refining that form pushing the grit back in the surface and here we are doing the same thing with the metal rib using the smooth surface and a little bit of water to smear some of the finer particle clay back into the gritty crevices and then here we are with the final form. I spent about another hour refining this and accenting the details on the foot and the lip and you can see there's not very many marks left from the pinching process so I hope that goes to show that you can use the pinching process to make any form that you like.