The first week was kinda frustrating but I like what I have accomplished so far. I don't have a finished piece yet but soon.... I am going to roll out some tonight that I think will not crack or warp on me.... This is the first test piece that I started to carve but it did end up cracking on me. It is hard to get the temperature right and the drying rate cool.
Well today I made my templates to roll the clay into. It went fairly well but still a few bugs to work out. I am used to throwing on the wheel and not rolling out slabs of clay and it showed this first week.. I will figure it out. It is a little hard when you are creating something unique like this that will be fitting into an 8x10 frame. I have been working on it all week little by little. I got a 8x10 at Michael's and took the glass out and have been playing with the dimensions. First I just rolled out a piece of clay and put the glass over it and cut out the square. The only problem is that when it dried it had shrunk a little to much so I could not use the glass as the template. I went down to Home Depot today and they cut out a little bit larger than an 8x10 frame and I was able to start making the templates using that. I put some rubber matting on the bottom of the 12x12 square piece of plywood and stapled it down. I then took some small slat pieces of wood and nailed them in on either side of the template with some small finishing nails. I was then able to roll out a slab of clay and drape it over the template and start to roll it on top of the wood slats to get the desired thickness. I cut some 1x1 square pieces to make a stacking platform for the templates to dry on. My hope is to be able to be working on like 10 or 20 piece at a time. I would like to see if I can get to producing 3-5 a day.
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