Ceramic Love Birds

1. Love Birds: I got my idea for this project at Amoco dot com. They give you step by step photographs that show you how to make a clay bird. I'm going to show you the process in video, but I'm also going to take it a couple steps further and show you some more advanced options on how to make variations on your bird. So here today, I'm gonna teach you, make a couple of love birds, starting with basic pinch pots. Now I'm going to go pretty quickly through the pinch pot routine, but you can see it in some of my other videos at a much slower pace. Nice roundball. Twist your thumb to towards the bottom. Begin pinching notice my fingertips reach all the way to the bottom of the ball of clay and slowly rotate around and up. The more I pinched the clay, the wider the bull gets and the thinner the walls. I can use my paddle to help get rid of those fingerprints and lumpy areas. I was giving it a general smoothness. My words are going to be pretty much long and skinny, but if I wanted fatter, Bird's eye could reach inside the pinch pot and stretch it out from the inside. Since I'm ready to go, I'm gonna slip and score my edges and then pinch that together for a fatter bird. I'm gonna pinch together the bottom lip of my pinch pot and see if I think the body looks fat enough. Not I can reach inside and stretch it out. Give myself a nice back, well fed bird. Here again, you see me slipping and scoring, preparing to blend that seem together, I can add a coil of soft clay to fill in the gaps and make sure there's plenty to blend from one side to the other, getting a really good seal on my bird. Once I've sealed that edge, I've got a nice air bubble inside of this pouch. That means I can put more pressure on it than I would normally, especially with the clay being this soft. That's gonna enable me to really blend out the surface, and I can begin to manipulate the shape of the bird. I encourage you to just experiment with a variety of tools, pushing around the clay to create a neckline where I can use my hands to pull out the beef with the tail, just pinching on it and stretching the clay into the shape that I want. Looking at my bird, I decide I'm not really happy with the position of the head. Some literally gonna cut it off, reshape it and reposition it. This also gives me another opportunity to reach inside and stretch out. Reshape Bird accidentally stretched out the neck of the bird, making it too big. Just let me show you how to fix that. - For once, I'm happy with the shape of my bird. I need to just let it dry out a little bit. We're back with some of the birds I made earlier. I didn't cut these open to stretch them out at all. And you can see they're still really nice and lovely. Now they're leather hard, and I'm gonna keep one wrapped up in plastic while I work on the other so it doesn't over dry at this point. They're leather hard, which means I can really put some pressure on them and start to shake things here. I'm going to use my straight ID rib to refine my surface. If I have any bumps or bruises or just ugly spots. Scraping them away can go a long way to refining your bird. I can also use it to remove clay, for example, around the neck. I want more of a neckline, so I'm scraping pretty aggressively to reshape that. In addition to this rated rib, you have all kinds of modelling tools angled would tools Luke tools in which you can remove , play and reshape your form again. This is working for me because I left the clay alone long enough to dry to leather soft, even liver leather hard that we're still really soft and gooey. I would be making a mess out of trying to spoke to it with these tools. Of course. In addition to removing Clay, we can add Clay, I decided I want the head of the bird to be a little fatter. But of course I have to slip in score because I'm adding soft play toe hard play. In this case, I'm gonna actually overbilled the face fatter than I wanted to, so that I have room to smooth and school kind of scrape some of that away. That's when I'm really going to refine the form. Now it's time to think about how I want my bird to stand. Do I want it? The head pointed upward or it reaching towards the ground. I'm just gonna paddle the base of the bird and then shave it so I don't have a Weeble wobble bird that's gonna roll over. If the clays gotten so hard that the rubber kidney won't smooth it out, then I can grab a family knife or a Luke tool and start to get rid of that serrated rib texture. Unless I like it. In which case I can leave it. Notice that I'm not trying to cut with my fiddling night. It's more like I'm shaving the surface. Next, we'll start thinking about wings in the Amoco examples. They didn't carve any textures or wings, and that's totally fine. Whenever I get an idea from another artist or in this case, Amoco, I like to try and figure out how I can make it my own bring something new to it. So in this case, I'm going to experiment with different ways to make the wings more interesting. Want to start by just using this rated rib to cry? Try and create a feathery texture that's one option. I decided I don't like that texture. I can carve it away with this technique. I'm just creating a recess in the clay. It cast a little shadow suggesting the wing. I might also choose to draw out where I want the wing and then use the corner of a loop tool to create Theo edge of the wing as well as some texture. I decided this is my favorite option. So I'm gonna go back and carved the other wing to match, even though I'm not gonna use it. I want to show you one other option for creating a wing. Got a little bit of slab. It's leather hard cut in the shape I want. I'm gonna bevel the edges so that they appear to be thinner than they really are. Look at the shape and size. See if I want to do any more trimming. I'm gonna hold it up to my bird and compare the proportions. See if it's something I like and then carve out the texture just like we did for the other wing. It can hold it up to my bird and sea. Is this something that makes me happy or not. I can add facial details by pressing into the clay carving in a way we're even adding to the clay. I think the most important part of this project is thinking about how your birds we're gonna interact. Are there going to be pointing towards each other away from each other, Do their beaks reach each other? Is one smaller than the other? Really think about that as you paddle and and scraped the bottom edge. Now that I'm almost finished, I can take a little tiny bit of water, a sponge. Use the pressure from my fingers to really smooth and buff everything out. Finally, it's important that I put a needle hole through the bottom of each piece so that it doesn't explode in the kill. I'm excited to see how your love birds turn out different than mine. Please post them so we can all appreciate it.