Hi guys and welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. My name is Tori Solis and today I am going to be sculpting another chicken pot onto one of my wheel thrown bowls. The first thing I am going to do here is roll out a slab so that I can use this slab to construct the body and the other parts of the chicken. I'm using a steel rolling pin because I don't have a slab roller. I'm going to carefully roll this out, cut out the piece that I need and then I'm going to form the head of the chicken.
I can say that I have not loved sculpting with this clay. This is the Longhorn Red Terracotta by Armadillo clay. Throwing it on the wheel was great. It felt really great and it listened really well, and I feel like it would be really great to make some larger thing with. But as far as sculpting it, it's been incredibly frustrating because this clay is not very plastic. What that means is it like to crack when it bends. I've been using a lot of water while I'm working and fighting the cracks more than I normally would need to while I'm sculpting. It also feels like it dries out pretty quickly. This is a grogged clay. That's what the people at my clay store reccomended, so I went with that, and I haven't been loving it. I feel like I've spent a lot more time than I normally would just working out the cracks, and also feeling like the connections that I have been making weren't as well connected or as smooth as with some of the clays that I have worked with previously. It was even easier to sculpt in speckled buff than it was in this terracotta.
I went with this terracotta because a low fire clay is going to be more porous when it's fired and it's also going to be red when it's fired, which is going to be a more natural base color for the chickens. Having it more porous is going to be functionally a bit better because it's going to allow the plant roots to get air to breath, and for the pot to drain really well. These are going to have to be incredibly amazing for me to want to continue sculpting with this clay. The results are going to have to be phenomenal for me to keep putting in the extra work that it takes to work with the particular clay. I might try using the Armadillo red without grog, and see if that works better, and I might try a couple different low fire clay bodies. Maybe this one just isn't exactly ideal for what I am working with. But we are going to have to see. This is just what I am reporting in based off of the experience that I have had here recently with making this chicken.
I think that they turned out pretty good, but the chicken require less detail work than my dragons. If I was making a dragon, like, I don't think that there is any way that I want to sit down with this terracotta and try to make a dragon. It sounds like that would be just incredibly frustrating, especially with how much this clay likes to crack while you are working with it.
This chicken is almost done. I'm doing the face now. She's a nice little hen pot, and she's going to have some fun eyes. These were incredibly popular and I've gotten a lot of questions about them. I am making more. All of the last chicken pots were Christmas presents for people in my family. I gave them all away except for the one that I kept for myself. I plan to make a lot more of them. I'm still experimenting with making them in different clays, and making them in different designs and using different textures. They are really fun to make. I'm using the carving tool now to add some feather details, and a few extra last minute pieces.
If you're wanting to get one of these chicken pots, I am going to have them for sale. You can become a patron of my work at patreon.com/bluenosetrading, patrons are going to have two weeks of exclusive first access to all of my ceramic shop updates. Then if anything is left after that, it will be available for everybody else to purchase online or at the farmer's market. I hope you enjoyed watching this process. 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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