Trying New Techniques

I finally got around to trying the techniques outlined in my last free inquiry blog post. Nothing I tried ended up as successful. One big mistake I made was setting the oven timer too long. I have been making the clay pieces thinner as I have learned more and made more earrings, but I did not adjust the time the clay was in the oven. As a result, all the clay has a slight brown color which it did not have before. I swear the colors looked much better before the baking process! However, I did learn a lot this week.

I first tried coloring my clay with green and yellow acrylic paint. I found that the process was a little bit messy but overall very manageable. The colors turned out nice but were quite pale in appearance. I tried adding more paint to darken the clay, but something very strange happened. As I added more and more paint, the clay turned sticky and had an almost gum-like consistency. I had noticed that mixing in some paint did soften the clay a little bit, but adding too much paint made the clay completely unworkable. I took a video of how the clay reacted to being cut with a knife when no paint was added (white), a little bit of paint was added (yellow), and when too much paint was added (green), to show the consistency differences.

I was able to mix in more unused clay into the sticky mess that I had made, and the mixture became useable again. Once the clay had cooked, I did notice some steam bubbles in all of the pieces. This doesn’t bother me so much though, and I do think that I would use this technique again (of course with proper clay-paint ratios and cooking times).

One last thing I did was paint the clay after it was baked. This did not turn out at all, as the paint did not adhere to the clay well, and therefore went on in thin streaky coats. To get the color opaque I would have to add many many coats, which I do not think would be worth it. I gave up on this technique very quickly. I’m looking forward to trying this out again next week, and possibly some new ideas as well!

Photos and video above by Tyla Penner (CC by 4.0)

Header photo from Unsplash.com