Hi guys and welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. Today I am going to be working inside because I'm going to be doing some hand building on my counter top and I'm going to be making a chicken planter that has a base of a pinch pot. So let's get to it.
The first thing I'm going to do is grab a piece of clay and then I'm going to work that clay into a nice even ball. I'm going to smooth out any cracks that I see in the surface because cracks, just in general, are a horrible thing. I open it with my thumb and I pinch the pot out. I'm using my palm to keep pressure on it as I shape my pinch pot, open it up and keep the walls even.
I get my hand wet with a little bit of water and I smooth out any cracks that might be appearing; cuz like I said, cracks are the root of all evil. Now I'm going to get this rough rib tool and I'm going to make it really rough all the way around every side of my pinch pot. I know it's crazy, but making it rough is actually how you make it smooth.
Now that I have smoothed it out I'm going to go ahead and use my finger with just the tiniest bit of water to get rid of anymore cracks. I'm going to a little more additional shaping here. Refining, shaping, shaping and refining. Just really getting the shape that I want to start with whenever I go to start sculpting more of my chicken's pieces.
I put it on the banding wheel to continue shaping it from every side, smoothing out any cracks as I go. You definitely, like I said 100 times, you don't want any cracks while you are doing this as it's going to cause major problems later.
Now I need a slab. I'm going to use my roller here and I'm going to roll out a slab. Do this in fast motion because it takes me a lot longer than we have time or patience to sit through watching me roll out a slab. Once I have my slab, I'm going to go ahead and cut off all the uneven parts.
Now I need to make a head for my chicken. I'm going to start it with this sort of cylindrical shape, and kind of go from here. I'm going to go ahead and stick it on the thing and shape and size it out. When I connect these pieces I want to smooth it out inside and out, there can be no cracks. "No cracks" should be the name of this video. Now I'm going to cut off some of this excess clay. Now I have got a shape that I want.
I've got my jar of slip for this clay and I'm going to go ahead and score and slip all the edges that are going to be touching each other here. Just for extra security on this bond. Now I'm going to go ahead and attach that piece, and I'm going to smooth down the edges with my pallet knife first. Then I'm going to use my finger to refine and smooth the edges and to even out the clay that's on the inside. Because it's double thickness here unless we even it out really well. So I'm going to refine, refine, remove any cracks that I see as they are forming.. just get rid of those right away.
I use this egg crate to flip it over, to keep the soft clay from getting ruined while I refine and smooth out any cracks or imperfections on the bottom as I go. I have determined that is pretty much good to go. So now I'm just going to do some more shaping with my hands, really getting in there to make sure that I'm getting the shapes that I want. I'm applying pressure from my inner fingers to push to clay around and outer fingers to control how I am shaping it.
So now I am going to sculpt some parts for my chicken. It needs a beaks and it needs some eyes. I'm not actually attaching these pieces right now, I'm just kind of lightly sticking them on so that I can kind of get a feel for what I want to create, as far as like, refining the sculpture. I've got her little comb.
This is actually going to be a female chicken, and I'm debating on if I'm going to carve eyes or going to stick on eyes. For now I need to shape these eyebrows that we had kind of going on into eye sockets. I definitely want to give her somewhat of a feminine eye, since I said this is going to be the hen. I gave her a little bit of a swoop off the end of her eye. I know it's not incredibly exciting to watch because I had to really.... there we go, we got it flipped around now. annnd we got to go back this way. Sorry with this part you just have to go where you go because it's... you just get into it and you keep going and refining the eyes. Refining, refining, this takes a long time in case anybody was wondering, getting these just right. Just doing sculptural work. I am using the rubber tool here to get the sculptural work and the details done, and sometimes I dip it in water.
Alright, I've figured out where the comb is going to go, so I'm going to slip and score both sides. Go ahead and attach the comb. I'm going to let this one, since it's so tall, I'm going to let it sit for a second and then I'm going to come back and refine it in a little bit after it's a little more well attached. Alright, look it straight in the face and do a little bit more refining.
The next thing I want to do is her tail feathers. So she's a hen and not a rooster, so in my design idea she's going to have shorter tail feathers than the other pot that I made, which was a rooster. If you follow some of my other social media accounts you might have seen that pot already. I'm dabbling with the idea of doing it as one piece, or stacking pieces, maybe doing them all separate and layering them in. What I've decided is that I want to do them as just little nubs, attached to the rim of the bowl, and then kind of smoothed in. So I refine the nubs, get them on there, slip and score them in, smooth them into the bowl.... add another one.. and I'm going to do three, because art and working in threes. She has three bumps on the comb on here head, so this will kind of call back to that as she has three tail feathers to match the three bumps for her head comb. I'm going to go ahead and just slip and score, smooth these in, get them exactly how I want them, give her a good look-over. Looks good, doing what we want to do here.
Now I'm going to shape out her wings, and go back into this comb and re-refine it. I'm adding a little bit of clay in the edges to that I can smooth that and make a good, nice, even connection there. I'm just using the tiniest bit of water on my fingers to smooth everything together. Now I'm going to do a little more refining. I'm going to puff out her cheeks. I feel like that's nice and cute. Maybe I'll do something with the glaze on her cheeks too, now that they are all puffed out and well defined. Now I'm going to go ahead and add some details into these feathers, just carve it in lightly. I might come back and carve it in deeper once the clay is in a new state.
Now I'm going to go ahead and carve the wings in. I do want to try just leaving the wings carved in as a decorative piece on this one. If you saw my other chicken, I did the wings as separate pieces. So once I'm done I'll kind of see what style I personally like better. Now I am just doing a little more nit-picking and refinement, how do I want all these things to sit.
I'm going to smooth out the bottom real nice with my rubber rib. Then I'm going to go ahead and punch a hole in this, because this is going to be a planter pot, and planter pots need holes. We only make functional planter pots around here.
So, she's all done. I'm really excited to see how she comes out in the end.
Thanks for tuning in this week guys. I finished up making this chicken pot and I really like how she turned out. She's going to make a nice addition to my collection on the front porch. If you thought this video was interesting go ahead and give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see weekly art videos, there is a new video every Friday at at 5:30 (CST) so you can go ahead and subscribe below and I will see you next week.
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