Making Easy Bisque Drape Molds from Household Objects Without Plaster- Day 31 Quarantine Distraction

[Music] hi everyone welcome back to my home studio this is my day thirty one of my quarantine distraction videos that have been doing for my students and for all of you I know that a lot of you are stuck at home right now without being in a studio or access to studio materials that you're used to using so this video is designed to show you how you can make easy drape molds from clay and you don't even have to have plaster using just objects that you have around the house look around and look at things in your house that you have and think oh if I had clay in that shape that would be a really nice straight mold if it's something that you can still clean off you can use it as a drape mold now in the case of some of my drape molds I just used some pots that I had around so I have an oval drape mold I have some round drape molds I have some that are [Music] made from just sorry from trays that I got at the grocery store you can look for the shape of a drape mold in just about anything though like one of the weird things that I was thinking about is look at your light fixtures like I have light fixtures that might be rounded or light fixtures that are long and oval and if you can wash that light fixture cover you could use it as a drape mold so this video is a quick little exploration of how you can make your own drape molds fire them and then you have a bisque mold that you can use over and over and over and you can do it just with materials that you have in your home studio or your homes wherever you're working so I hope you enjoy drop me any comments below in the comments or ask me any questions and I hope you all stay safe stay healthy and keep potting if you can reusable molds are so essential in a ceramic studio I have dozens of molds made of plaster which are at school I have molds that are made of wood where you can drape over I have lots of different options but if you're stuck at home and you don't have any molds I wanted to show you how you can make your own molds can be made really out of any fireable clay when I fire the clay I'm going to fire it just to a low fire temperature because I want to keep it porous so it can absorb water when I drape clay over it now the mold is going to be fired and reused multiple times I'm going to roll my slab about 3/8 of an inch thick I could go thicker with a half an inch but I think 3/8 of an inch will be thick enough for what I need one of the easiest ways to make a mold would be a wheel thrown form where you make a bowl and you can trim a foot off I'll show another video on that but these are just going to be molds where I drape it in two or over another object to get that form with my slab rolled out to the thickness of my thickness strips about 3/8 of an inch thick I will compress the surface with a rib it'll smooth out imperfections but as always with a slab building the compression and ribbing actually makes the slab stronger I will do that with both sides now I'm going to make some molds out of different things first I'm gonna make a mold out of this bowl all I do have a video up that shows how I did that on the wheel it's my Facebook live video I'll link that if you look it'll be a pop-up card that will link and I'll put the link in the video description I do plan on making another one a little bit more detailed about that as well so I'm using the exterior of this just to trim this out it's probably a little bit bigger than I actually need it to be and again it's about 3/8 of an inch thick now my plan is to take this lab and to drape it into the bowl you want to always put a barrier between a non-porous object and clay because otherwise it will get stuck I could put something like maybe moist paper towel strips I could put a bag but both of those would probably result in wrinkles I know some people where they put something like Pam or a vegetable spray I personally do not want to do that I prefer not to get too many contaminants in or on my clay instead I'm going to dust it with cornstarch now cornstarch is organic and it will burn out I just keep cornstarch and an old salt and pepper shaker then I'm gonna spread that around the cornstarch rarely leaves any sort of a texture now because I want it to drape all the way in there I might end up by trimming off the edge a little bit I'm just gonna take a little bit off because I had such a thick edge I'm afraid it won't be able to drape in there really easily I could have trimmed this before I started it but the cornstarch won't hurt these scraps it just dries it out a little bit so I could always add a little water to it okay now I'm gonna put the cornstarch side down and I'm going to kind of push it in there there were some air that needed to escape okay now this hooks underneath a little bit so I am going to trim this away just a little bit more and I can feel it's pretty much down in there just trying to level this off a little bit okay so there we go I'm gonna give this a few hours to start drying and allow it to shrink a little bit and then I should be able to kind of work it out and get it out of there without much difficulty okay for the next piece I am going to make a mold in just a standard old kitchen bowl and mine is even kind of dinged up and dented I've been using that in my kitchen for years now normally I would have like a bunch of templates like this cut out all of my templates are at school right now it with the exception of this but I wanted to circle a little bit bigger than this of course I could use a compass and cut out a new one but I decided just to use a bowl that I have down here and I'll set it on there and I'm going to trim this out so the circle that I'm cutting is smaller than this silver bowl because I don't want to make something fully that size that is for the mold I just want a little bit smaller okay I'll remove this this might even be a little bit deeper than I wanted it I'm not too sure once again I'm gonna cornstarch it and dust it around I'm going to just eyeball it and try to get it as close to in the middle as I can when I stick it in here so as I push it in the air has to kind of sneak out from underneath it and this is going to take the shape of the contour of the bowl I have to admit I'm not as crazy about the contour of this because this metal bowl had a flat bottom and then it curved up I prefer ones that are completely domed and round but I just wanted to show you this because this is what I would assume many people would have in their kitchen so I've got two molds now for the next one I'm going to actually use a bisque piece and again I could use a glazed piece and you would just have to make sure that it doesn't get stuck with the cornstarch or something as it means for keeping it from sticking I don't really need cornstarch with this but I'll do it anyway because if you're placing clay on a bisque fired piece it is going to absorb so much moisture that it should just pull away so this one I'm really going to try to push in this is going to have a much deeper curve to it and I'm not exactly level you can see that I'm a little bit lower on one side and higher on the other I'll wait until that's dry when I pop it out and I'll try to level the edge and I'm trying to do this with the least amount of finger dents as possible and then lastly I wanted to show you another way where you could just kind of drape something into the midst of it okay this is one similar to the other oval but instead of pushing it down in and pushing it all the way I am just going to drape it on the top so I'll just actually leave it on there just like that and I'm going to give it an arch so not not as deep as the actual pot but a nice little arch so there we go I will let all four of these molds sit up and get leather hard I'll come back later today and show you how I would finish those off for firing for this slab I'm going to be using just a regular styrofoam tray that I got at the grocery store something came in it like meat and of course I washed it really well as I rib this I want to be careful not to make any odd indentations I want to have it really super smooth notice that I'm kind of lifting up the edges to make sure that it actually fits down there in the corners now this mold that I'm making once its bisque fired I should be able to use both the interior and the exterior of this the only reason that I put the clay on the interior of the styrofoam mold is because on the exterior the styrofoam has some lettering and numbers that I didn't want to transfer before this dries I want to just make sure that the angle of this all looks even and I'm going to run a needle tool along the edge so that the side of the needle tool is running along the side of the styrofoam obviously I don't want the needle itself to poke cut or scratch the styrofoam there we go and again it's quite thick because this is going to be a mold from which I can mold other pieces of clay once I fire it so I'll set that to the side as well and let that get stiffer okay so these molds have been sitting overnight and I had a heavy bath towel on them because I did want them to dry but not dry too much this one feels just right it's a leather hard and you can see that that'll pop out nicely I'll go ahead and pop these out and then I'll show you how I would finish them off well totally drop that one when I took it out I just wasn't careful I can still rib over the dents that I just put in it though alright now that I popped them out of the mold I'm ready to clean them so I'm leveling the edge of the small round one first with a sure form just like I would level the edge of say a pinch cup now I'm ribbing the exterior to try to get rid of any cracking maybe use a little sponge there as well and really again trying to make sure that the outer edge is nice and clean for the next one the oval one I'm just working on leveling the edge of that using a little bit of a sponge a little bit of a rib to clean that one up same with this one now this one I'm just making sure that the edge looks round and even so I can use it with the drape mold I have a couple little dents there that I needed to clean up and after i sponge that one I'm done and then lastly I'm doing the larger Bowl and here I'm just correcting some of the dents that I inadvertently made when I dropped it and then cleaning it up in the same manner okay true confessions time I have this outside in the Sun and I let it dry for a couple hours and it worked so I tried to flatten it and wouldn't you know it I got a crack right here so when you have something like that it might be better just to recycle it do it over again but if you're really really really trying to salvage like is something like this you cannot just blend over it the way to solve something when you have a massive crack is you need to first of all be super aggressive and get in there and you have to make it look worse before you can make it look better so I am going to be really aggressive with my scoring now this is a dry leather hard is what it is it's definitely not plastic at this point because I did let it go a little too long out in the Sun on accident and it was it happened when I went to go flip it upside down to flatten it out again because it started a cup and then it ended up by cracking so now that I've scored I'm going to take a little piece of clay now this is plastic clay and I'm going to just kind of play with it here for a minute or two to help dry it out so I'm gonna roll it boil it back up roll it I want to get it a little less plastic and a little bit closer to the moisture of this I decided to leave this part in because I think this is a very practical thing to know how to fix a crack when you've done something like what I did I was just impatient and I was a little too aggressive so I'm now going to score where I have aggressively slipped this and you have to make sure you at least go to the bottom of where the crack was okay now I'm going to score this coil and then I'm going to put that in there and then on this backside I'll do the same thing okay now that I have that in there I'm just going to blend it over that okay the only way to fix a crack like that is to be aggressive slip score fill you cannot just blend and explain expect that to take care of it I have students all the time who they have maybe the crack on an edge of something and I'm like you've got to be aggressive you got to really get in there if it's bone drying it cracks you either have to get it back to that leather hard stage or just restart okay so continuing where I was I'm going to sponge off yeah you have a couple decisions when you have a mold like this okay I could leave it with a shape like this which indicates that I will end up by trimming it off on this edge or if I wanted it to go flush right down to the table surface that way I could put a flange on it I think that's actually what I want to do so I'm going to use a sure form and I'll show you that so in the case of this I'm going to take a shirt for and I'm getting rid of kind of that edge of the flange that sticks out do that all the way around and here I'm just again cleaning getting rid of that little Ridge that I had trying to make sure that it's very smooth and continuous coming down to the table now by allowing this to come all the way down to the table this allows me if I would want to take a slab and place it over it and have it flare out I could then have a rim on it and I'm not held to any particular size of a rim now when I just ribbed this I did and advertently create a little indent so I'm gonna score again again take a little bit more of that clay and attach and fill it because I really don't want an indentation there and again just trying to remedy and fill that little crack and tidy up the rest of it get it completely clean all right this one looks like it is complete I am good to go with this and this will dry and be a nice bisque mole [Music]

Channel: KaransPotsAndGlass

Views: 92,826

Rating: 4.8511839 out of 5

Keywords: easy, beginner, basic, bisque, drape, mold, molding, slab, roll, draping, form, forming, molds, create, make, demo, demonstrate, plaster, making, simple, tutorial, show, how, clean, smooth, fire, firing, studio, basics, reusable, durable, slabs, rolling, set, up, creating, class, classes, teacher, student, students, high, school, studios, kiln, Karan, Karen, karanspots, and, glass, potter, pottery, clay, ceramics, ceramic, stoneware, porcelain, earthenware, press, ribbing, clays, Mason, Ohio, Cincinnati, best, youtube, video, instructional, educational, online

Id: Pw4LHn9aVxA

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020