A Femme’s Guide to Improvement: Advanced Finger Painting

By The Hairpin September 28, 2011

by L M

This week’s nerd confession is that I spent at least one morning a week in a pottery studio for seven years of my youth. My teacher was an ancient, very serious lady named Naoma, and she ran a school called Access Arts first out of her home, then at an annex full of clay and kilns and wheels and canvas-covered tables. If you’ve never pounded the hell out of a piece of clay, you don’t know what you’re missing.

I’m not even going to try to teach you guys how to make gravy boats or vases or ocarinas, because among prepping, making, curing, trimming, glazing, and firing clay without making it explode, it gets really complicated and expensive. However! We’re still going to get our hands dirty this week and decorate our walls! (Notice how I didn’t say “art.” This is not, in my book, art, because I’m not trained and there is no artistic/aesthetic intention or design. It’s just advanced finger painting, with some slightly-fancier-than-tempera-paint media. And it’s better than that framed Chat Noir/Toulouse-Lautrec poster you’ve had in your living room since college. See? Your cries for help have not gone unnoticed!)

You’ll need:

Something on which to make your mess. Canvas isn’t great for this if you’re doing a big piece, because it tends to have give and won’t hold your clay still. Use art board or, you know, a big, lightweight piece of board sanded smooth.
Acrylic paint in whatever colors you want
Paint colorant (really concentrated color used for dyeing paint. I use Sheffield Tints-All.)
Any natural — not polymer — art clay. You won’t need more than a pound, though the smallest package is usually 2 lbs.
Liquid varnish (for acrylic, not oil, paint)
A soft-bristle brush

All of these things are available at your local art store, and none of them is expensive, which is the Handy Femme cardinal rule.

The first thing you want to do is install whatever you’ll be using to hang this. A couple nails and a wire should do it. (If you try to do it after, you’ll run the risk of running the clay.)

Next, paint. I just diluted some of my paint with water and washed it over the surface. Then some undiluted white acrylic for texture, scoring it with a fork, making patterns, basically going nuts. Then some more paint here and there for concentrated color.

You could stop here, I guess, but it might just look like a finger painting.

Take your clay and cut it into tiny pieces. (Letting them dry out makes this a little easier, but isn’t necessary.) Put it in a big mixing bowl and start adding water a bit at a time, emulsifying it with your fingers. You’re making slip! Not fancy, pro, weighted/measured/ashed slip, but just plain ol’ girl-in-your-kitchen slip. Keep adding water and blending until you have something a little viscous, like a very thin pudding. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it sit for 24 hours to, er, ripen.

The thicker bits of your acrylic paint should have set by now, and it’ll be safe to paint over everything with your slip. You can tint it with your colorant, if you want, or some paint, or leave it gray, as I did. Using your soft brush, apply the slip. You can do one even layer, or keep adding layers to parts of it to play with texture. Once it starts to set a little, use a knife, fork, spoon, whatever utensil you want to score the thicker sections of clay and make it more interesting and let the colors below show through.

Let it dry for 48 hours, or until cracks begin to appear in the clay. This is when you’ll apply your varnish, again with the soft brush. It’ll fill in all the cracks, holding the clay together and the whole thing to the surface. I’d go with two layers of varnish, but, like all the steps here, what you do is up to you. The leftover slip will keep well in an airtight jar, just like … sourdough starter?