Pinch Pot

Materials needed:

*Crayola air-dry clay

*Water

*Water cups

*Various sized paintbrushes

*Paper towels

*Paint (acrylic not recommended)

This project is a great introduction into ceramics or sculpture. This is a fun way to get students to learn how to control their movements and to form a work of art in a slow and meaningful way. It is also a great project to teach students about the history of pottery and the styles of ancient American Indians.

*For a tutorial on this project visit My Artistic Odyssey*
In creating this work, I started out with a smooth ball of clay and slowly and gently pushed my thumbs into the top middle of the ball – forming a small little well. I kept gently pressing on all parts of this new hole to create a larger and larger bowl-like structure. Once I formed it to the size that I wanted, I then pinched with my forefinger and thumb in the places that seemed a little lumpy to make the form more uniform in thickness throughout the piece.

After the thickness was established, I then decided on a shape that would make this pot more interesting. I immediately thought of a petal or flower design and gently pushed in five evenly spaced indents into the rim indicating the space in between petals. I then gently pulled and pinched out the petals to define them a little more. Because of this dramatic change in shape of the pot, the piece began to develop small cracks in certain areas. I gently smoothed it with my finger. If it did not work or made the surface look unpleasant or not smooth, I would then wet my finger before smoothing, which would loosen up the clay and make it easier to refine the surface.

Once the entire surface was to the texture that I desired (smooth), it was time to let it dry. After drying over night, it was time to paint the pot. I had previously drawn designs after doing extensive research on traditional pueblo pottery. By making these sketches, I was able to decide on a design and then figure out what colors I wanted. The pueblo pottery designs is a mixture of matte black with shiny black designs in the piece, so I went with darker colors for most of the piece – black and purple. I painted the inside purple as well as the top half of the outer area of the piece. I painted the rim yellow as a complement to the purple and the lower half of the outside with black to comment on the pueblo designs. Then, carefully with white paint and a small bristled brush, I painted an intricate design that began in the yellow rim and carried down into the black portion of the pot. Once I was finished, I allowed it to dry over night again.

The important thing that I learned from this project was the choice of kinds of paint. Acrylic paint was not a good choice, because I noticed that if the paint heated up between my fingers at all, the paint would stick to my skin and would peel off the pot. Next time, I will use a paint that would adhere and sink into the pores of the clay surface a little more. This project was so fun to learn about the pueblo traditions of making pottery and how to replicate them. This is a great hands-on tool to get kids learning about history, geography, culture, and even art history all in one project. It will help students to connect with the information they learn and retain it at a more successful rate than they would by just reading about it in a book.