Elements and Principles

Today's lesson is a focus on the elements and principles of art and applying those on a very basic level to clay! So what are the elements and principles of art?

Elements: Line, Shape, Color, Value, Form, Texture, and Space!

Principles: Balance, Contrast, Emphasis, Movement, Pattern, Rhythm, and Unity!

So how do we apply these to clay you might ask? Well simply by designing a FORM of a pot that uses the elements and principles. For our purposes we are going to use Form, Pattern (also known as repetition,) and Unity! 

First of all we will be using a technique of making a ton of tiny little clay balls to unify into one form of a clay pot! So you will need clay, I would suggest a clay body that has grog in it because this clay body did not and if you are going to build something that is larger than this small bowl then you are going to need the grog to make the form stronger. Also if you prefer you can utilize a potter’s thumb for the next few steps but one is not required. 

(The aforementioned potter’s thumb)

The first step is to make a bunch of tiny little balls. The use of repetition is very important in this step. You will need to make sure that the clay balls you make are similar in size because when you take the form out of the bowl you will see the size of the clay balls on the other side of the form. If you want that variation of the repetition in the size this is fine also but be aware of the size of the clay balls that you are making.You will need to line your bowl with a paper towel or with newspaper as the clay will stick to the walls of your bowl making removal hard. 

(ALSO ADD A NAPKIN UNDER THE CLAY[It will help release it from the bowl{obviously I did not do this}])

Then you will use either your fingers or your potter’s thumb to push the clay together causing the balls to join together. 

 Here are two examples of the clay being smoothed together by your thumbs.

 Here is the form I created through this technique of hand building! This form shows the unification of many repeated shapes to create what we see here. So that is one way of using the elements and principles of art in clay. Now, if you would like to make a second mold of the bowl or another form and then join the two you can make a sculptural piece similar to the piece shown below.