Paper clay ceramics

I've been having a play with paper-clay, after a friend showed me how to make and use it.  It's surprisingly tough and easy to construct with.

 I used about half a loo-roll to a 300mm cube of very soft/wet school clay.  I rolled the clay out to about 2cm thickness, added strips of loo-roll, rolled again and wedged - and repeated - until I had a good consistency and the paper was no longer obviously visible. Then I used like normal school clay.

After making my basic hollow-shapes, I joined them and skewered them onto place, using thin sticks and some saved polystyrene packaging (see photo below). What a brilliant method - it stayed so strong while I added heads.

When the model was leather-hard, I removed the sticks and transferred the model to a board. The holes left by the sticks were easy to plug with soft clay. Now, fingers-crossed it makes it through a kiln-firing.

model skewered into polystyrene with sticks

sticks removed and holes filled in, final decoration added

Clay workshop in Beech Road Park, Chorlton Arts Festival

I was involved with the Art in the Park event at Beech Road Park on Saturday
Friends of Beech Rd Park, part of Chorlton Arts Festival.
The Clay workshop session had a good turnout, despite the heavy downpours at lunchtime. Lots of wonderful models were made - here's a sample from the session, including dinosaurs, hedgehogs, pigs, the Grufflalo, frogs, trees, pugs, pandas and a robot.

Character development using clay - colours added

Hoink has been fired with iron oxide for orange-colour plus a satin glaze over white slip around his eyes. Clod, the badger, has white slip stripes and manganese dioxide for blackish colour.