I hollowed out the back of the model today which will help let the clay start to firm up a bit, I also did a little minor work on it as well. The sculptor has to work around and with the materials and the “mood” of the materials, clay definitely has a “Mood” that depends on the humidity in the room, how moist the clay is, how thick the clay piece is and what is being made with it. When the clay is fresh it’s very pliable and soft, it can also be sticky which makes using tools difficult as the clay wants to stick to the tool. I usually…

I cut out a template tool to use to shape the convex holes on the left strip so they are all the same curvature and size, of course they all need cleaning up and refining, but that has to wait for the clay to get firmer as the moisture dries out of it. Right now the clay is still very soft and will be until I hollow out the back.

Here’s my clay model just started with the larger scaled design applied to the surface using a ruler, square and compass. The original nickel plated bronze artifact to the left being used to resize the model is from the Women’s House of Detention at 10 Greenwich Ave, NYC which was designed by Sloan and Robertson in 1931. The connected courthouse was the scene of the notorious Harry K Thaw murder trial of renowned architect Stanford White in 1906. I rescued several of the individual bronze pieces from the jail when it was being demolished in 1973, I was 13 at the time and even then recognized their importance. My clay…

Now I have the size for the clay model calculated out to allow for the moist to dry shrinkage of the clay model (5%) plus the eventual 10% shrinkage involved with the hand-pressed clay version with it’s drying and kiln firing. Added to these two factors is an additional amount to make the resulting fired clay pressing close to the fired size of the Nortown D5 panel- 18-3/4″ x 12-3/4″ With that calculated out and plotted out on paper I have both my full scale reference print-out and the box-form required to start the model after a little more prep-work. I’ll be making one section of the repeated design, making…

Now I have the 3rd fired panel out of the kiln, I had lowered the final temperature 10º to 2050º and the end “hold” time from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. Also, I placed several kiln posts on the floor of the kiln so the panel could set on top of them on end and be raised about 1″ off the kiln floor and still allow the kiln lid to close. It looks like this solved both issues I had, one was the red color I wanted had started turning towards the more brown spectrum for this clay at the 2060-2079º temperatures, so lowering the temperature to 2050 solved that,…

I think I’ve all but decided I’m going to “remake” my Art Deco 8B panel with a new slightly larger model and issue it in hand-pressed fired terracotta  too. The 8B design which I’ve had for years is this one: It’s 16-1/2″ wide and if I “convert” this to terracotta using the existing design the shrinkage of the clay will make it wind up in my opinion on the “dinky” side around at around 14″ wide, so I’m thinking that if I make a new model around the original size of my Nortown D5 panel it will wind up around 19-3/4″ wide or whatever I come up with so it…