Air-drying clay

I firmly blame TikTok for an unexpected foray into air-dry clay. For some reason my feed decided to show me artist after artist making cute little things with DAS clay - and it looked so easy! So satisfying! Just slice, mould, dry and paint! Yay! So I watched a few more detailed Youtube tutorials, dug up the various tools and ordered in some supplies.

It went about as well as you would expect. It is indeed a forgiving material, and fun to work with, but it is very difficult to get even a halfway decent result. I tried slab cutting and some just finger-smooshing but you can't use too much water, so minimal handling is best. They call it clay but it's mostly paper, and dries over time without firing, so it's not food safe or particularly water-resistent but you can make it quite robust with sealing, painting and varnishing. 

I am not neat-fingered, and my first try was absolutely the Year 1 ashtray that we all made, back in the day. Just a lumpy mess. This one above didn't even get past first base - when I went to sand it before painting I broke it in half. The same thing happened to two more little plaques I was doing and another dish I made way too thin.

This was a little more successful - it's a funny lumpy little dish - but I got through all the stages and it's pretty and exactly the right size to hold my rings. So that's good.

Here is a foray into decoupage - the brown flecked stuff is a flocked paper that I had for lino printing when I was excited about that for six weeks - which was quite interesting but the rest is an amateurish sham.

This is an oval one that wasn't too bad, although it's not smooth at all. It looks OK from a distance, to hold buttons or something.

And a square one. Painting it is fun but they are quite clearly made by a beginner in a back room. Nothing like the Tiktok videos! I might do a ceramics class at some point and learn how you do it properly, with a kiln. I've got a couple of other ideas to try but then I might put it gently aside.