Building Gestural Forms with Fred Yokel

[Music] I'd like to try something completely different does anybody have any questions up front louder louder really okay I have a bad ear so I can't hear myself talk this is sculpture raku mix right whose sculpture they call it sculpture rock who I use that and I use a smooth sculpture if I want more detail and my pieces but I'm carving something very fine although the carving that I do goes from this wood texture to a lot of detail patterns sometimes I put patterns on pieces like this that I do linear or just any kind of little pattern that gives it an accent on the piece like a belt line I do that a lot I do on occasion actually this whole series of figures started with a thrown piece it was a jar and you know how in and throwing you have the components of a pot you have the foot the belly the shoulder the neck all that stuff so I just kind of made it a little more literal and I did a little bit of a cut down the middle of the bottom of a pot to fake legs and I did a little bottle stop head and I put some nubs on forearms that stuck out and I had I made a series of them and people liked them so i kind of morphed it into actual figures but you'll notice my figures aren't very anatomically correct there's a couple of reasons for that too one they're clay and you can't put little tiny feet normally with a regular-sized body on them a piece that's gonna stand by itself unless it has a cane or Walker or something because they fall over I mean I try to build them kind of earthquake proof you know they'll take they'll take a little bit and depending on how big their feet are you know they'll be better or worse so the way I start these pieces is uh I usually make a couple of pancakes like this for the feet and the typical thing I do is if I want them to match I put them together and cut a shape for the foot I flip them over - if you may have noticed so that if I have a left and right when I flip them back over they are left and right and in my method of building you can have I also use these these are great hopefully somebody will you'll have a tidbit here that you can use in your own work this is Hardiebacker it's cement boards they sell them in all the hardware stores and I cut them they're real easy to cut with a mat knife you just kind of score it a little bit and then break it like sheetrock it's called Hardiebacker har di I use it to work on because it absorbs the moisture out of my clay it doesn't warp or they stay completely flat you can't don't warp so I build on them because it helps absorb the moisture at the beginning of my pieces I want it to be stiff enough so that I can do the next layer and the one problem with my pieces is they're very time consuming this kind of hour-and-a-half thing is is not enough to build a whole piece I'll show you little components of it and how we get to where I where I get that it's a it's a spread over several days if I had the the weather was perfect you know the moisture in the air and all that stuff and the time I could probably do it in a day but that's what I do I usually do a few pieces at the same time and go back and forth like this I brought this one which is at a certain level this is the beginning and because the actual time span Ottoman isn't isn't as great as it may seem it takes a lot of time and and I'm constantly manipulating them because the the one problem with my method is that a building hollow there there I call them loyals because this combination between a coil in a slab I make a fat coil I'll show you in a minute and I flatten it and in order to build a taller piece you have to let the bottom stiffen up a little bit because you can't just keep going it'll sag flop and collapse so you have to wait 10 15 20 minutes depending on the weather sometimes a long time of it's Iranian outside and the air is humid it takes a lot more time Party backer back is it's hearty board or Hardiebacker Hardiebacker is what they put in showers and stuff before they tile and they sell it as siding also the type Allen was pre-cut is 12-inch by I don't know 10 feet long so I can just cut it in 2 foot increments I like these you know they're 1 foot square which is kind of nice and everybody has their own preference for that kind of you know what they worked on plywood sometimes sheetrock put your slabs in between sheetrock does it it might I've very rarely see any mold on these things my canvas for my slab roller if I leave a slab in there a little bit sheetrock because it's got paper I would say ply was pretty close similar but the plywood will absorb the moisture and warp if it's not thick enough so this is my soil that was the action accident actually I was talking to a class and I was nervous and I wanted to say I build with and I had coil in my head and the word slab started coming out and it went came out soil pretty dorky but it caught and I kept it I said that's a good word so I build a big fat coil very quickly out of the out of the bag and then I flatten it a little bit and you can do this you know you can get either way however you're comfortable doing it and then one of my favorite tools the serrated rib metal flexible and I score this and I score my pancake foot sole and because it's clay is fresh I don't really need to slip but I give it a little bit of a moisture I call this the Chanel and then and these are really fat I press it on around the outer edge kind of hope that you have the right amount but it doesn't matter because oh and I can see sometimes better too so another favorite tool this this thing because on the inside of here if this is a small piece like this one I can't get my finger in here as easily so I used this to to press down on the inner part of the coil sticking it to the slab and I mean you know what I'm doing probably if you've done this but this is big enough so I can use my finger I compress that down to the slab smooth it out and I use this also on the outside I go down with the coil and up with the slab so they stick together compression compression is your friend I'd already to the inside with my finger I'm going down the coil and pushing the coil down and I'm pulling the slab with this so I'm going up like this down and up and you notice how crude I am yes no I'm crude especially we have lunch with me because it doesn't matter I have I refine it later and then this is I call this throwing in place it's because it's like throwing if swish if I have this centered but I'm squeezing and pulling in and up at the same time because this is way too fat for the walls that I want I want my pieces to be semi light so you can actually watch the piece grow as you do this and it's much quicker than you know little coils if you were going to do little coils and you do one row and then you smooth it out like the Native American pottery or some some people do that and there's nothing wrong with it and if I have this gap I did it on purpose I didn't have a coil big enough on purpose so I could show you how I fix it I just fill it and because it's soft clay no you don't need any moisture really blend it in in and out and then the fun part is with this serrated rib I call this a blender too because what I'm doing is shaping and blending all of those lumps into a smoother form and I start at the bottom the other thing to do is if I'm gonna have feet I don't have very much very many figures that have feet that actually stick out but I do a little bit of a point and just like pinching a pot I squeeze it pull it in and up and make the impression of maybe a foot so you can see it starting to taper so that it gets a impression of a of a foot and then this is a great tool I'm supporting it on the inside of my finger and shaping it at the same time one of the things I look at when I'm doing this is the profile the apex of the piece because it's in three-dimensional space every time you turn it it has a different profile every every eighth of an inch every quarter of an inch has a different profile if you're looking at it from one direction and these lines actually help accentuate the light on the piece and help me determine whether or not I'm getting it smooth it's obviously not smooth because this is serrated but it's smooth compared to the pinching that I have just given it and the crudeness that I put it together with and it allows me to start forming the direction that I want it to go well I was gonna say earlier one of the problems with this method is because this has to dry more or less before I put another coil on you have to be very careful with what direction you're doing your piece and know which direction you're going because it's going to get a little stiff and it's harder to change later people who build solid don't really have that problem they can build the whole form they get a real nice gestural shape out of it right away because it's solid you can hit it with a two-by-four you can form it you go I don't like that and you can hit it back the other way you can't do that with this so it has it has some limits some draw drawbacks I guess each method I do I have drawings here I have a sketchbook please ask I mean this I have everything in here so it's not just my figures but I and you can't read those names those are kind of yeah yes oh that's what I forgot I little max maquettes once in a while too they're solid I can make one I'll show you because one of the other things about building a form is what does that arm do where is that arm yeah cuz I mean might have funny anyway but yeah you know semi-realistic quasi quasi so it's nice to have that Mac hit to see how things actually flow I mean if you have a model sitting over there you know that would be great but I'm not doing I'm not doing humans either I don't want to do humans you know there's plenty of people that do actual realistic human figurative work that are much better than me so well anyway I'll do just a little coil figures and I'll actually do it this quick sometimes I don't know if you've ever seen the Clayton Bailey no Arneson artisan did some figures that were like this they're very simple crude quick they're really cool too of course they're by him so they're cool anyway and if you do this you can start bending shaping little nuances into the the piece so you can get the feel of when you make it bigger you have something as an example to to work from it really helps actually I don't do it or not should do it up here so it doesn't stick right I do I go for about three eighths because I carve on my work and I want the potential to be able to carve back into it you could go thinner have a lighter piece and not really I mean you know you could go you go thicker if you really want to carve a lot it's it's pretty yeah by the time I I mean this piece is starting to dry in the bottom I can let you feel this when I get going on this piece no I don't do anything very particular anymore with drawing because I just let them air dry and the only time I cover them I cover them while I'm working on him because I want them to be at a particular point when I start carving I I call it the Homer for for my the the the stage at which I like my pieces to be when I carved them is leather you know which is a Homer thing because it's it's a real fine area where I I carve within I most people carve know which part they liked to carve at I don't like soft because the stuff sticks back down into the piece leather hearts perfect I can you know get my tools in there I have my favorite tools that I carved with and so I cover it while I'm carving because I want to come back to it a carving can take a long time depending on what you know detail I'm doing and so I need to I need to have at that consistent leather hard stage so if I was going to make this figure go a direction I'd be thinking about it right now about is he going to be leaning is his foot gonna be up and I'd start forming it right away right now because I might even do it earlier than this as I put the coil on and start forming it I might go a direction because this is soft enough right now this is a good time and this is what I use for a paddle most of the time because I'm doing small areas and I'm constantly looking at that profile that I'm talking about the apex of the of each one of the curves usually I have something in mind that I'm going for so I know what I'm looking for this not so much I'm just showing you how I do it so it might develop over over the time we're allotted today and I might go hmm and a figure might emerge and I go back and forth sometimes I go through my sketchbooks I have this problem of being I call it the art director syndrome because an art director has to give these ideas and draw these sketches and go okay this is what we're gonna do here's the idea and then he gives it to the photographer and illustrator or whatever to execute and in my mind I'm done and that's part of the problem by sketchbooks I have way more sketches in there than pieces I've made because half the time I go well I drew it I'm done I I don't want to go through the hassle of making this now so so I look for another you know a new idea this guy's at that gallery actually right now oh and I have this if I can pass a couple of these around for you to look at there's more pieces in there you can get an idea of the movement in my pieces hopefully pardon the second coil now that yeah now that you've gotten this I usually try to keep this a little bit even I'm not that concerned with it because when I go to put the next coil on it'll probably be stiff enough so I won't do it now usually if the clay is the clay is very soft I will maybe add a little bit and go as far as I can go before it starts to collapse because they don't want it to collapse so yeah I'm maybe I'm not understanding your alright okay how do I do the second one okay here yeah I can show you and I'll show you anyway but the wall of this right now is something like this so the next coil is going to be kind of like this because it's really fat and all I do is I blend this in I push it in and then I pull up again and I'll show you that's what I'm gonna do on this did you want should I continue and make another foot or do you understand that should I go somewhere else I'm going all over the place I do it I do both feet right away I'm gonna start it it won't take too long to do this part and that's not enough clay but that's okay you notice I always I kind of always taper these ends too because when I put the next piece on that's something I've noticed too if you put two pieces together and they have this taper the surface area is better for adhesion compression and it's also if you put two pieces together like this the clay when it's in this state it this is the length of the clay it's going to shrink this direction and it's going to pull away from there it's slight and it's probably not a big deal if you know how to compress your clay but I had a friend do a piece like that and he put all of he cut all of his pieces to match the ends he butted them all together and after he fired it you could see these little lines because he didn't put enough compression on it for one and the tendency for the clay is to stretch away from the the longest point so typically he's like this that foot that first foot uh-huh you would add the second slab yeah like I said depending on the weather yeah half hour today you know we got a good it's pretty quick I noticed this one stiffened up a little bit more I don't know if you know this method if it gets a little bit too stiff to work on wet these rags put them on there leave it for 10 or 15 minutes and it's really nice this is really pliable now I never use heat I don't really need to I don't know I don't know if that would work very well I'd kind of be afraid of it actually you know yeah yeah it's - yeah I would think it would be - it's too much of an extreme difference - quickly I think you might be asking for trouble I mean it's not like throwing you know on a wheel where you want want something to not sag or you want to add something to the top of it so yeah one of the problems with a drawing a sketch they don't translate into 3d really easily actually it's funny you know you can go oh that looks great but then when you get to the 3d world to go where does that arm really go or where does that leg how do you cross legs in clay it's not as easy as it seems for me anyway I'm sure there are people out there they're much better at this yes yes yes I have used smooth sculpture on occasion this is my favorite clay because it has the grog in it and it can take a lot of abuse porcelain out of here I'm allergic to porcelain for sculpture pardon this is sculpture raku which is homegrown right here a clay planet and I like it because of the grog it takes a lot of beading and I have basically you know pretty good results and I iraq who a lot of my pieces too so it can take the shock I haven't used travel buff so I can't tell you but this is a you know essentially I'm making a couple of tubes if the first ones that I made that I threw you know I made a couple of tubes cylinders short cylinders and I used them as legs stuck them together and made a third cylinder above it that connected both pieces together and then altered the shape there actually I think there might be one in that little booklet so the hard part one of the hard parts is the transition when you get to like crotch areas or you start adding arms that's when the most I don't know how to describe this it's uh you have to see a lot of things at once at that point the direction you're going with a piece how to make it anatomically correct even though mine aren't really I want them to have that feeling that they're based on a human form which is pretty easy to do you know you stick some you know two legs two arms and it's you don't have to do much to make people know that it's a human based see I'm not thinking here I'm going the wrong direction with this one so normally find thinking ahead I'm getting these to aim it to a certain direction so that they can eventually attach and most of my pieces don't have a very much leg length I keep them low that's part of that ability to withstand an earthquake the fact that you can't I don't do very small legs because they'll fall over so you can see most of them have these big big wide legs and big white bases and sometimes I do it that short so I'll put the legs up to the you know they're they're not gonna be able to walk really it's like a cartoon which is what it really is yeah this one's just off he has two left feet so I'll call him the dancer yeah but I'll show you on this piece also how I I get those two together well let's sit for a little while and this is when I started yesterday there already has that he's already been attached and I I do this a lot too when I start putting the two legs together if I want him to do something a little more dynamic than just standing yes and you know you can't be sure whether or not is really gonna stand when you start putting them together so I support them with a support of some kind luckily this one worked so far but it depends on how high you go up here and which direction he leans whether or not the center of gravity is going to have him continue to stand the very first piece I did that had one foot he was on one foot and his foot up in the air I did this and I had I had a little thing holding his leg up the whole time I was building him and I'm thinking I had this guy's gonna fall over I don't know and I really lucked out because when he was done I pulled that thing out and he stood by himself but I don't recommend those for freestanding pieces usually I'll mount them on a base I'll put a dowel in I put holes in all of my pieces most of them depending on how they're built so that I can have a dowel on a base so this one is ready to go to the next the torso level anybody want some coolness keep asking questions you haven't no I don't I haven't I haven't had the need to really I try to keep right on top of the drawing sequence for my pieces so I know they're ready and if I if I'm not I'll do this I don't know if you saw this this is great because this was stiff when I got here this morning and now I can do this with it so it's it's fine I know people use vinegar water for repairing I haven't had the need to I did I I'll make the same feet just like this and at a certain point I'll start pounding this to get a flat spot on it determining which direction I want it to lead or up on a toe sometimes I'll build a whole leg with a knee bent like this surfer guy and they'll come up like this together and then they'll eventually connect and then like the chef you know he's got a I don't know an apron or something on that covers all of his legs so I don't have to worry about it so he's precarious you can feel it you know if you keep these centered on your work surface they're a lot easier to work on so this is what I'm doing here where I have this fat coil on top of this thinner coil and it kind of overlaps hopefully equally on either side of the coil underneath it and then I can just squeeze it down the key is having those two compressed together to avoid any firing you know sometimes you see your your connections in a piece if you don't compress them well enough I've seen that before I've had it happen I try to avoid it but I'm not perfect so once that is it in there I start pulling it again and looking at the shape this piece is intended to have just gonna be going like this and that those little this is part of that gesture thing I'm talking about where if you go like this it says one thing if you go like this it says a completely different thing subtle but the nuance is in there and the way the hand is if you see these hands it says something completely different if you have the fingers up just a little bit like that and I do that a lot it gives it a little bit of air and in this piece he's doing this what am I looking at there's a piece of art over there I'm framing it and and there are so many things that you can do and with movement in a piece you know the way the knee is bent the way the toe is sitting the hands are one of the best places there's a lot of gesture in a hand that you can manipulate and have it have a meaning certain fingers for example so I do a lot of squeezing at that joint because that's where my the main concern is to have those to be very compressed together [Music] [Music] and you can see how little concern I have for being perfect perfect upfront because this is going to help me out a lot and I'll start way down and come up past the joint that I just made and try to make the transition all completely smooth and I'll go different directions with this to get rid of lumps or divots and if you have divots to go in you know like that this isn't really gonna help so you have to go in here and push it out and I use these these are great to get down in there if you can't get it if it's way down in there and there's another one that has more of a paddle look it's longer I use that too to get down in there and push pieces out yeah I was just gonna make a comment out that I have there's a couple of techniques I start like this and then I'll start doing this but it starts getting thin of course so I learned it such a basic and obvious technique from a friend of mine you just make another pancake like a disc and you kind of keep the ends tapered a little bit and if you put that rope right where you want the butt to come out or whatever the part is I do butts and breasts like this push it in from the inside and it just you push it out it starts cracking a little bit but then you go over it with this and it blends it all together so I can get that thickness back and it's a great way and it works fine you I usually I'll put a dab of slip on it when I'm doing that to make sure I have no air gaps or anything in there and shove it in and the compression with your finger or that tool is gonna make it fine anyway I've never had any problem well normally I'm doing the but when I'm right here so it's right there and I can get it and I'll do it right then so when I when I whenever I get to whatever level I'm at on the figure I'll start pushing out or pushing in or cutting I'll cut darts out of pieces if you know darts are little wedges triangles that I can close a piece because a lot of times I get to a point I go it's ugly come on what are you thinking so I'll take the fennely knife and all I'll cut a a wedge out and push it back together I don't like doing it it's a hassle but it works if if you can get your fingers in there to get those because you have these you have it like this and you're gonna pull these back together you know you're closing a form or whatever to bring it back in you have to get in there and score and I score and slip on that occasion when I'm because I'm having to repair basically and I'm going down into something that is already starting to dry so the deeper I go the more intense it is so that's why I say this method it has some drawbacks which are are that you can't tell what your piece is really gonna look like until you get to each level unless you're you've really done it a lot I've done it a lot and I still have problems with it though party yeah you can do that too yeah well I actually a pucker is better than a crevice because you can you can just use this if it's on the inside and you know I support it with my hand on the outside and I press as hard as I can try not to thin it any more than the wall of the piece and then on the outside I do the reverse I just I'll paddle it or I'll you know push it with this does that make sense because many times I've done a dart and I put it back together and I'm off a little bit on how I cut it and there's this this going on there's a little bit of a gap and you have to kind of backfill them and I mean if you know how to handle the clay I guess it's just like any repair you know scored slip and put some more clay inside and hope you can get it to look like the rest of the surrounding area yeah there is a little bit of leeway in that the problem I found is later on if I'm carving for example if I'm doing like a wood wood texture which I've been doing a lot lately and I want a really deep crevice to go to make it look like real antique old weathered wood I'll cut through and now in that instance it's not too bad of a thing because it's dark on the inside it's black it just goes to a you know a black hole but it's uh I don't like to be able to see into there actually if I can avoid it I want it to get lusion that it's a solid piece of wood if I'm doing that kind of look so this guy has some organic manner matter in his leg I can see it's a degrading now well I can I can put these together so you can see how I do that next transition from which is basically the crotch area [Music] now that'll be in the way so I'm gonna call this a really short legged cartoon figure if I put them together this quickly this soon I make these triangle pieces usually to have the transition between that take that gap from that the curve from the outside of the foot or the leg to get them to blend together well this is a this is actually a curve that goes like this so if you do this shape it can go in there and blend them together and then I manipulate the heck out of it yes yes yes it has a word and if this is a different height I'll just make this bend down one way and to bring the height of this one back up to this height if I want that I kind of do so I'll just bend it like this no the good thing but the good thing about a bronze is they can make a mold off of just about anything so I gave them a bisque piece to make a mold from pardon well for bronze you can do anything I mean it's probably better to use plasticine oil-based clay to make your original they probably like that better because it fired pieces it's gonna break it might break I've done it with a a wet piece thinking that that was a good idea they hated me because it's shrinking as they're doing the mold it was like leather hard and I thought oh how to be good it'd be like plasticine wrong so I'm doing like I did on the with the coils just blending them together inside and out and I'll do with this on the front in the back and this is if I'm doing my normal thing I'm starting the button now because it's usually where the crotch is so I will start that and you can see I'm I'm faking it I'm just going what looks like it'll fit there oh this might and I use a lot more clay than is necessary because I have it to push around to shape if there's extra if there's not enough I have to go back and kind of start again blend them together the hard part also when you're getting to this point is the underside you can't get in there you want to lift it and flip it over and you can't really because this will flop it's too soft so I have to wait for it to stiffen up and I go back that's the other reason I try to keep my pieces semi leather hard the whole time because most of the time I know I'm gonna have to flip this over like this one when I put these two leg cylinders together I can't get in there until I can flip this over so that detail and smoothing will come later but hopefully not when it's too stiff because then you can't do anything and when I first started doing these figures I figured this was a very weak point if you picked it up by the legs there's this stress that you haven't you just snap it right there so I was building I don't know what you call them they're architectural things like flying buttresses in here to combat the distress from this and I realize after a while I don't really need it it's a hollow form it's circular and it has a lot of strength in in the way it's built so I stopped doing that and realized it works fine just building them as a shell with the same thickness everywhere and you just don't you don't go up well I don't have any pieces here that have long legs the ones with long legs I never pick them up by the feet because the tendency when you lift is to squeeze to be able to not drop it and you just snap the legs so I lift them always by the torsos if I can and you know you see some saw somebody want to pick one up like this once they went to reach for tonight no please it's clay it's not bronze yeah yeah you can pick a baby up like that right not we did that when we were kids and the other thing about getting in there with this it can't really get in there now with this too smooth very easily so I do as much as I can and I know that I'm gonna have to do it later so I try to get it as smooth as possible actually before I put those two pieces together in areas that I know are going to be problematic but the nice thing about clay is it's ultimately malleable and you can do stuff with it that's why we get no respect it's not like it's not a it's an additive not a subtractive or you know like stone marble would I respect those people greatly to be able to leave a vein on a piece of marble oops start over yo make it a little smaller yeah exactly I'm not worthy yeah I mean I just think I'm not worthy and in my own little uh I don't know retentive way I want this to be equal equal because later on when I work on it I don't want to have to go up and down so I will fill these areas as I go along to try and make it semi even at the top layer and I will add bits here and there even though it's a little early sometimes if I know I can do it if it's too soft I just won't do it and I tend to like softer bags of clay when I make pieces like this because it's much easier to put a soft coil on a stiffer piece underneath it then putting a hard coil from a hard bag of clay on something it just takes too much pressure there's too much possibility of distortion I'll show you I'm doing it right now see how this is the high part okay okay right right it can be even within its curve if that makes sense because if if he's gonna go off to this direction you know it can have a level point here even though he's being moved that that way does that make sense yeah yeah I won't go I won't build him like this normally there are instances where I do that because of what's coming next like if there's gonna be an arm up here and I want to start attaching an arm and I know I'm gonna have an arm up and an arm down I'll do that right right and that's one of the things about that piece that's going to be problematic because I know he's up on one foot and a toe at least I have a almost tripod base going on because you know there's almost three points it's one and a half two which helps and I try to balance him over that the center of gravity on this leg to keep him from falling over this one okay yeah kept going over here keep it horizontal or just keep it parallel I probably keep it horizontal until I got to a certain point until I got up to here and I usually yeah towards the end of a piece like that I would start aiming it towards the closure of the shoulder area yeah each one you know has its own nuances little problems for how to balance it and keep it from falling over and still looking okay yes here's a little bit soft it falls a little bit but because it's so short and it's and when it's soft and at this stage too I can manipulate it anyway even if it does start to collapse a little no I don't it might be a good idea yeah yeah I don't know I guess I've gotten so used to the fact that I just let them dry and then I'd have to take that out when I put the next piece on so I'd probably annoy me I know you're really I was I still AM no I I didn't really do any sculpture when I was growing up and going to school and all that I was so interested in making pottery and then it got to a point I was a production Potter for a few years and I just got tired of making the same pieces over and over so I said I don't know I want to do something different kind of morphed because I was doing pottery when I made those first pieces that kind of stuck well you know you you glean from everywhere thrown yeah I was an actual Potter production Potter thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces I worked for both I worked for a place in Palo Alto it's called Earth and fire ceramics back in the 70s and then another place in Los Gatos what was his name I forget the name of the company yeah he sold an old town and and and he sold on old Adobe that a haircutting place on his name was Jim Doty I think he's still around too so there I get the level again more or less mud in your eye that was one - yeah what was that guy's name he was a competitor actually of us but he was friends yeah I know I think it's a haircutting place old uh old adobe is a haircutting place I think now at least the building the building is there yeah I don't know if they're I don't know if I don't know if there's a place in Old Town anymore I haven't ever been yeah and sometimes I want to go back to throwing I have these ideas I constantly have ideas anyway can't get away from that as an artist I want to do woodworking and bronze and paint what's that oh yeah I'm huge list yep Cassie anything no no no not new same it's it's a very expensive process and I'm more that starving artist than a yeah probably if we come back later I can add the but on this you can see how I do it because I don't think I don't know what time it is and how much time we have so I can probably get to that I can make a hand separate I can show you yep and how I do an arm and a bend it bend in an L and a head my head's are really simple but yeah I can show you it yep your arms are so it's like oh really come on is that all you do it's just two tubes tapered I do depending on the size if the size is like this or this and even this these I can do they're small enough to where I can make the whole arm and attach it I don't know you've probably all seen someone building an arm seperate and attaching it to thing and it goes dear and it falls off and you see the scoring marks and everything I've been there so I know but I I make them hollow most of these arms are hollow this is probably hollow up to about the wrist so it's a tapered tube one section and then another tapered tube for the narrow for the forearm and there that's one of the tough parts getting to have that expression because and I'll actually start with a doughnut a coil doughnut on the shoulder right here and pull it out a little bit to start and then I'll start doing coils until I get to the point where it's easier to make the taper tube if that makes sense and sometimes I mean I go back and forth I'll make a taper tube that's this long and this big around from this down to a smaller tube and attach the whole thing the problem is getting in there and making sure my compression at the joint is is nice because that's what I want and I usually it's like building a piece to hollow piece and you can get your finger in there the whole time until you can't get your finger in there at the very end you have just enough for that and you plug it so I'm doing the same thing with the wrists I'll build a hand separate as the last piece with a little plug taper on the end of it and stick it in that little tapered tube which is the wrist at that point and manipulate it you know because that whole arm has been drawing each segment of how I my process you know I'll go from here to here and let it dry a little bit because I know I'm going to be sticking something on there I don't want it to go blep and flop away so so I'll start with a the type of a type of arm I have a couple of different tools this is one tapered wooden tool and I have a larger version of this that's about this long it's got a really smooth taper on it that's great for sticking in and then you roll it and you get a tube out of it it kind of automatically centers itself and it comes out kind of in the center when you're rolling the harder part is getting the walls even because I'm pressing down and trying to make it a tube it is a tube but it's kind of thick so depending on the the arm size I'll just end up using my finger to get it to the size or I'll use this and press out and you just got to go be patient go around and thin the wall until you get what you want and this is all of this stuff as you all know with experience you start feeling the thickness of your clay and you get used to it if you're a Potter you know how thick your walls are but this is not this is how I did some of those yes usually about this size I'll do this way because the one thing I can do with this if this hole is big enough I can get a tool in there and this is the tool I usually use to connect this to the shoulder I'll go in there and this is where I start using slip a lot - I will manipulate this joint to match the one on the shoulder very carefully because I want it I don't want any air gaps or places that I have to repair I want this to match at the angle that I wanted that as much as possible it's not easy to do because I'm constantly I forgot my exacto knife my very main tool you know I'll have to cut wedges out to make this you know it's not at this angle now now it's at this angle and it's amazing how when you bend an arm how far down this angle has to go actually in order to be to have a bend in it it's it's quite interesting and I'm not I don't know a 3d engineer guy who sees that space as easily as some other people might see it so I'm constantly cutting and repairing in order to get that to match so this could be the forearm of an elbow you know that the wider part would be in help oh yeah another thing I do is supports I I'll use a piece of clay just like this and I'll stick it to the side and manipulate it up and just go like that I'll just go and that will hold this arm at a particular angle or I'll use skewers you stick them through the guy at various places to hold the piece up and they're easy to repair that hole it's a small hole and you got a weight you got to be careful though because when you're pulling it out you have a risk a little especially with something like this this is small these I usually just weight to the right consistency and it usually will stick so if I'm gonna do an arm the elbows are always interesting elbows the n-nice the bends the back of the knee the inner part of an elbow is always interesting there's a woman who makes these really beautiful heavy women sculptures what's her name she's in Davis she has a bunch of pieces up at the net Sheila's gallery not Michelle Gregor she's Japanese I've lost Esther Shimazu Thank You Esther beautiful beautiful and I want to watch her work because she has the folds in knees and arms but she has a very heavy figure and they're anatomically correct pretty much hers are very very nice so you could do these pieces separate like this but like I said I don't normally do that because putting a whole arm with that weight to this attachment is kind of iffy a lot of times I'll have the arm touch the body and then I can do it no problem it's easy because you have support you know yes yes and getting the curve you know I have very tubular arms you know getting the the taper of an arm is an anatomically correct arm it's a lot different than what I do pardon yeah yeah sausage so this is how you get a this is one way of getting the bend just tapering the to the two sides and sticking them together but like I said remember how far that has to go if you want this arm to come into here both of these tapers are extreme you can see how much I'd have to get rid of if I wanted this to almost come back to like this it's like what happens to that arm and I'll do that too else you know look at a mirror and see how I bend sometimes although I'm not as heavy as those guys usually kind of skinny yeah that's where this it depends on the size this ends up going to a solid probably I mean I go as far as I can and or I'll do these shorter segments so I'll cut it you know here so I get a tool in there or my finger in there until I can't get my little finger in there basically as I try to go as far as I can with tubes and coils until I can't and usually that that's the point at which I can go to a solid form and not worry about it so does that make sense am i answering some questions I hope enough I'll make a hand what's that if you're gonna do it smartly which I'm not you do two at the same time so you have the same amount of clay because matching the hand once it's over here on the piece and I see the smart people out there doing that you know Esther she'll make all the fingers and all of the palms at the same time I'm a glutton for punishment or something I guess so I take a piece of clay and I start smashing it and I think about a hand and I start giving it a little bit of a dent where I'm gonna put a thumb and all the while I'm doing this I'm saying to myself that needs to be longer or not so it's kind of odd and I look at hand and I go okay which parts sticking out the furthest you know that you ever seen that chart where if your first finger is longer than your middle finger you are from or whatever or you have a tendency to do this or whatever because most hands the middle fingers longest and in little fingers the shortest so it has this taper [Music] so everybody do this we're gonna have a test everybody has the same we all have the same hand so I think that chart is maybe a lie and I'm compressing yeah and the other thing I do I don't know if you've noticed there's very rarely any fingers on my pieces because fingers break really easy and I I admire those people the sculptors that make clay hands with fingers yes there's one of them I believe she has little tiny fingers on him Sergey I suppose has these little tiny fingers and they have fingernails and everything you're going I don't want to touch it and they're porcelain so you can see I'm just kind of it's a mitten I call the mittens and I'm trying to get it closer to alleged reality but because they're caricatures more than realistic I don't really have to worry about it which may be a cop-out on my part and I'm not doing anatomically correct perfection and I have a tendency to try and smooth my pieces I'm one things I didn't say is after I do this serrated rib when this starts getting leather hard I go back with the smooth rib and I scrape and this one is probably at its where I would start doing it you can come up and feel these if you want at some point and see their consistency but I go through a whole other blending process of scraping all of these this is what this is getting dry but it's not too dry and this is where I start perfecting the form and the transitions between the different parts and if you notice if you come up and look at these you can see the scraped look especially on this one since its bisque you can see all of the surface is just that's all a metal rib and you can see the grog coming out because one of the things I like is the texture of stone and that's kind of what I started doing with these I tried to get them to look a little bit like stone rock and I want this I want as smooth the transition as I can if you feel these I hope that I'm getting the flow all the way through and that's with a metal rib and that's the other reason for having a three-eighths inch thick wall I can scrape quite a ways down and and get to the the smoothness that I hope I can I'm trying for and you know it doesn't always happen this one worked really well and I accentuated it with these lines these are carved with a needle so I go back into the clay with a needle tool and draw these lines I just go like this scrape scrape scrape scrape who said it has to have a hole it's in his head that's a hollow head and then my other favorite little carving tool you can't see this probably it's the straight one and after I do that that crevice I go back and I I scrape each one of these by hand and I should probably make a tool that actually does that better which I thought about that's one of the finishing touches that I like to do and the same with this this is a I don't really want to touch this I'm gonna get well I can wash it off right pardon yeah yeah so clay and I wanted to talk about my glazing technique if you're interested the top part on this I do a lot of rock ooh but raccoon something like this is the older I get the less fun I'm having lifting those things out and putting a minimum garbage can so I don't want to miss stuff and I'm jumping around did I answer your question about a hand enough or the other thing is this is one of those places for expression you know like I said before if you curl that up a little bit like that you know all of a sudden it has a completely different feel this says one thing it's light it's maybe uplifting it has some kind of humor in it this is more enclosed and I'm gathering things together and you can go all over the place you do if you do it on the outer the little fingers it's it makes a different thing it's pretty if that's part of the fun too yeah oh yeah I wanted to show you that say it again well once I get to this point I can only do from the outside because what I'm doing is it's a cork it ends up being a cork so I'll score and slip both of these and stick them together and I'll usually add a coil maybe if I need to or on the outside and taper these together and then I mean this is this will have been attached to the form and this is the last thing I put on we have 10 minutes and then I manipulate a little bit of curve in in the wrist to give it an action if I want that action depending on what I want it to say does that make sense I hope so glazing I'm gonna cover this just in case sometimes yes I spray them and these vegetable bags they're really good they're very light freebies [Music] [Music] so my glazing is mostly under glaze I found that when I was RAK Kuen there were raku glazes and I always have this thing against whatever the term is being specific to that process I'm a rebel and people would say to me oh you have to use the right blue glaze if you're gonna rock ooh like no I don't you yeah you're not the boss of me I need that t-shirt so I started experimenting because one of the things I liked about or one of the things I do with my figures is I don't want them to look shiny are any of you shiny no one's wearing patent leather right yes the chef is that's a glace it's a recognized white crackle record glaze but I found that I didn't like that all the time because people when they walk around they are not shiny they're a matte so I started going well how can I get away from that I know I'll use a glaze that doesn't mature I'll use the cone 5 glaze on my raku piece well sure you can do that you can use content glaze who cares you have to experiment the bottom line is you must test it because you put a tone cone 10 glaze on that piece and it flakes off maybe it doesn't stick doesn't reach temperature or whatever cone 5 glazes can sometimes work I will use and then I started using under glazes and because under glazes have a high content of clay under glazes on globes and slips they're going to absorb the carbon in the raku and probably go black depending on how strong you reduce your piece right so I reduced them a little less if I'm using under glazes or I'll use sponge on glazes to have intermittent places of basically adhesion there fluxing in those areas to keep a little bit of shine on it so my technique for glazing is taking any under glaze that I feel like having I'll do it two ways one is I will put a base coat on the piece well this is like under painting for like an oil painting or a painting where you put an undercoat on to tie the whole piece together so it has one color underneath everything and I'll do it two ways I'll do that or I'll do only sponging and my sponging is pretty simple tedious because I have a minimum of three layers on my pieces because the more layering you get the more organic it looks and one of the problems I have a personal thing is I like it to look organic and it's really hard to make it look organic if you're doing a man-made this is a man-made thing to sponge so I have no choice it's gonna look like this sponge every time I touch this and have the same pattern so I do this and I go like this all over the piece what would happen if you didn't practice over fire gas or on fire the turquoise piece there who would is cone 5 it's not raccoon the lady here yes with the orange hair so you get more intense colors that's it cone 5 away with the under glazes you know under glazes have a range you start losing stuff at certain points does that answer your question what that is electric cone 5 under glazes I saw all under glaze the greenish one the other ones the thing that I like about the Araku is it adds that the smoke the unpredictability of smoke the the swirling of the flames and all of that stuff adds something to it that you can't get this is very organic and that's one of the things I like this technique is the sponging I mean I don't have enough here to really get a good color coat on here here we go this although it starts to get to an organic look it still has that sponge like I was talking about that particular patterning in the sponge so I mean one of the things I do is I spin it as much as I can and you can imagine I have to go over this whole thing and then I get another color and do the whole thing again it takes a lot of time the smoke yes if there's a little bit of clay left and even because these are under glazes in there high clay content they're gonna get that smoke also so a lesser reduction lesser smoke is going to leave a little bit of color and that's where I started liking these a lot because I'd have a subtle color on the piece but it was raccoon and it wasn't shiny I like comedy and I like antigravity you're talking about the piece maybe in here where the the sphere is floating yeah I'm not sure what you want to know about that but right she's right right I do that part of my thing is to have come up with a title and a gesture that is people will question or is reminiscent of something that I've seen someone do which is everybody everything is out there so you know I thought oh this is an artist looking at a scene going oh that's that'll work right there so my titles I used to do this more often as I strive for three words in my titles because it's the shortest number of awards least number of words that you can have and have a sentence kind of immunity to but it it gave me some leeway and it's really hard to do with certain things because you can't so I would try to get three words out of most of them uh-oh time to quit so I try to make a scene that is suggestive of something well thank you everyone you can ask me any other questions anytime you want on email or whatever else if I didn't get to the point and I guess I have to clean up for people because somebody else's can be here in ten minutes [Music] [Laughter]

Channel: Orchard Valley Ceramic Arts Guild

Views: 38,664

Rating: 4.8421054 out of 5

Keywords: ovcag, pottery, clay, ceramics, sculpture, clay carnival, figurative form

Id: 4DW9JitVLA8

Length: 91min 42sec (5502 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 23 2018