Hi guys and welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. My name is Tori Solis and today I am going to be throwing some bases for chicken pots out of this new clay body. This clay body that I have today is longhorn red with grog by Armadillo clay. It is a clay from Texas, and I'm in Texas, so it's nice to use a local clay. I'm going to wedge this up because I like to get the clay particles moving before I throw.
I'm going to be using this clay to make another series of chicken planter pots. The last series of chicken planter pots I liked a lot, but there were some things that I thought that I could improve on. This time I decided to use a low fire terracotta because I think that this clay is going to breath a lot better, as far as functionality for becoming a planter. Also, after this clay is fired, it is going to be red; which is a better base color, or at least I am thinking it's going to be a better base color for the chickens in general. I'm still going to do some underglaze decorating on these after I sculpt them.
I did get a clay with grog, so it is kind of gritty. It throws well. I've enjoyed throwing it. It's a little rough on my hands, but it's not too bad. I would say that it's about the same as throwing with Laguna speckled buff, and honestly it's not too bad. I will say that this clay obeys; it listens when I tell it to do things. It's easy to keep control of on the wheel. So if you're a beginner throwing, this might not be a bad idea. But also, this is a low fire clay. So if you're not throwing at home and you're in a shared studio space you want to make sure that you put this on the correct shelf, and that people know that this is a low fire clay. Because if you try to take this clay to cone 6 it's probably going to melt.
I enjoyed throwing with this clay body. I went ahead and just made some chicken pots of various sizes. They're not all going to be the same, and one of them I kind of messed up a little bit. I'm throwing these until I run out of bats. I think I have a total of four bats that I can fill up with these chicken pots before I have to take them off and start over. After I throw each one, I'm setting them off to the side in the sunshine so they can stiffen up a little bit, so they will be easier for me to get off the bat. I'm pretty excited to have this red clay body and to try a new clay body, and also to make some more chicken pots.
These are going to be quiet large. I started with two and a half pounds of clay for each one. So these are going to be five to six inch pots, as far as like, just the pot size for the plant itself. Once I get the chicken sculpted onto them, they could be anywhere from eight to twelve inches, depending on it it becomes a hen or a rooster pot. I've had a really good time throwing today. I haven't messed up as much stuff as I usually do when I sit down to throw. I think a lot of that has to do with this clay body being so easy to throw with. It's not exactly the easiest or smoothest on my hands, but it listens and holds its shape very well. It has a lot of give to it and it's not super delicate. It's very firm and sturdy. It was easy to open it up.
I messed this one up, but I was able to save it because I'm going to warp the outsides anyway. So it's just pre-warped into the shape of the chicken. Which is fine, because I'm going to trim them pretty shortly after I throw them. I've been trimming these while they are pretty wet still because I need the clay to stay workable for sculpting purposes. But I want to have the bottoms trimmed down in a certain way for aesthetic purposes, so I've just been experimenting with that. Recently what's been happening is that I have just been getting good at trimming the bottoms while the clay is wet.
I messed that one up, so, can't win every time. Especially not me. I mean, some people can probably win every time, but I still mess them up from time to time. Honestly, I was really happy with how this went today because I only messed up one. I'm not going to get through this entire set of clay balls in this video because halfway through I am going to run out of bats, and then I'm going to have to go over and take them off the bats. I have been setting them over in the sun so they can quickly dry up a little bit so that it's a little bit easier to get them off the bat once I'm ready to take them off.
After I get them off the bats I'm going to set them aside. I'm going to set them on these ware boards so that once they are off the bats they can continue to dry up just a little bit more, so that I can trim the bottoms of them really quick. I'm going to pre-bend them. These are going to be the spots where the chicken's head and tails are going to connect once I'm doing the sculpting. I just went ahead and made those indentions. It's easier to make those indentions while it's super wet so that the clay doesn't have any memory and spring back and cause cracking later.
That's pretty much it for today. I have four of these pots, which means I am going to have at least four more chickens. Thank you for joining me today guys. I hope you enjoyed watching the process of me throwing with this red clay. If you'd like to become a patron of my work, you can find that at patreon.com/bluenosetrading where you can gain exclusive access to exclusive content as well as early access to all of my YouTube videos. If you'd like to see a weekly art video, you can subscribe to this channel, Blue Nose Trading, and I will see you guys next week!
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