How to make a Leaf Plate // Handbuilding Ceramics for Beginners

Hey friends, welcome back to another pottery tutorial. So I've been seeing this design kicking around the internet for a little while now. And so I thought I would show you guys how to do it. So most of the bowls I've seen have been made with Monstera leaves. I don't happen to have a Monstera plant, but I do have this beautiful rubber tree here. So I thought I would go ahead and take one of his leaves and we can make a rubber tree leaf bowl. Let's get into it. So the tools you will need for this project is a work surface. I have my wedging board here. So you also need your typical slab building tools. So a rolling pin, two thickness gauges, mine are half centimeter and a rip. Additionally, you will need a knife, a shallow bowl from your kitchen, some thin fabric to line that bowl. Mine is a thin cotton fabric and optional is a scoring tool and some slip if you want to add a foot to your bowl. I'm also using a speckled stone work clay for this project. So I'm looking for a leaf that this tree can do without, maybe one in this cluster down here that's not having too much light. So you'll want to start by rolling out a slab. Keep in mind the size of your leaf. So you make sure your slab is big enough to contain the whole size of the leaf. You want to keep rolling until your rolling pin is rolling along the wooden thickness gauges and not pushing the clay anymore. Once you're done rolling, you'll want to compress your clay with a rip. Okay, so then you'll want to find a good spot for your leaf. I'm going to lay it where the clay is the most consistent and I'm just going to press it into the clay. Try and get it as flat as possible. And then I'm gonna go ahead again with my rolling pin and just very lightly pushing it into. Your leaf will probably break, that's all right. I chose the bottom of the leaf because I thought it had the most texture. Let's see how it looks. So then I'm gonna go ahead and lift the leaf off and we'll see how it looks. It's a pretty nice impression, I think. So now I can go ahead and cut it out with my knife. Going to leave a small rim around the stem because the stem is such an impression, but I want to keep that stem. So I'm gonna leave a little ring around it. We'll see how it works. And I'll just cut along the line that the leaf made for us. Okay, now we have our leaf cut out. And now what I'm going to do next is I'm going to get my bowl. I'm going to line the bowl with some fabric, just one layer. And then I'm going to lay the leaf inside of the bowl, pushing it down to the bottom. My stem is a little bit weak. I think I cut a little bit too far on the stem, so it's my fault, but it's also very thin. So I'm just gonna put two tiny little coils on either side of the stem. Just reinforce it a little bit. I'll blend them in more later, but right now I just wanna stick them there So I'm going to let my leaf now dry out for about an hour so it can firm up a little before we finish it off. Next, we'll be smoothing everything out and adding a foot to it. All right, folks, it's been two hours now, but what I want you to do is not pay attention to the time necessarily, rather pay attention to how firm your pot is. So when you take out your piece from the bowl, it should be holding its shape. This is what we want. So it doesn't matter how long you wait, as long as when you remove it from your mold, it's holding its shape. But I don't want to just leave it like this. I actually want to put a little foot on it. So there's some more work I'm going to do. But first I'm going to go about smoothing it out a little bit. So first I have these little extra lugs that I attached on there to reinforce the stem. I'm going to spend some time now blending those in. So mostly I'm just smoothing with my fingers, but you could also use a wooden tool if you can't get into any of the cracks. This can really get in places where your fingers can't go. And then I'm just going to go around the edges and just smooth everything out because I kind of have this sharp edge here. So I'm just going to go around with my finger and smooth that all out. Careful now to not smear the pattern at all. We want to keep that nice texture. All right, so now my edges are all nice and smooth. Now the only thing left to do is to add our little foot ring. So for that, I'm just going to roll out a small coil. As always, when you're attaching two pieces together, you want to score it. If you're using fresh clay, like I am with the coil, you do not need to use slip. So I'm not going to use slip when I'm attaching these two ends of the coil together. Okay, so now I need to attach the ring to the bottom of my dish. Now I need to be really careful. I can't just set it down on the table like that because I'm going to put too much pressure on this very thin part because this is going to be the part that touches the ground. So I'm going to hold it in my hand while I'm attaching it. And now we didn't need slip to attach this fresh clay together. The clay on the dish has actually been drying out for a little bit. So we will need to add slip to this side. But first I'm going to just lay the ring down and then I'm going to mark where I'm going to score. And now you can see I have a ring of marks so I know exactly where to score. And of course I need to also score my ring. Okay, now I'm going to take my slip, which is made with the same clay as this is made out of, and I'm going to put some slip on the dish itself. I don't need to put any on the coil. Okay, and then when attaching the two pieces together, I'm going to lay it down, make sure it's all lined up, and then I'm going to kind of twist the coil into the dish and try and get it to attach. Once it stops moving, you know that you've got a good attachment. I would wait about five minutes now to let the clay kind of chill out, effuse, and just like become one before I go about cleaning it up. Okay, so now I'm going to go ahead and clean up this attachment here. I'm going to use my wooden tool to kind of smooth out any of the extra scoring marks that I got going here and any extra slip. And I'm going to go ahead and shape this foot a little bit because I don't want it to just be like a coil sitting on the bottom. That's kind of boring. I'm going to do exactly what I did in a previous video of mine, which was how to make the berry bowl. And I'm going to just go ahead around all the edges and pinch the edge to start to shape it into more of a longer, thinner shape instead of a coil. Okay, and that's it, our leaf bowl. Well, it's not really a bowl, actually. It's more of a like decorative plate. I'm imagining like rings on it or like maybe your keys. Anyway, the shaping is done. Now all we need to do is get it fired, get it glazed, and I'll show you how it looks like when it's finished right now. I am so happy with how this plate turned out. So I used a celadon glaze, which gives it like a slight greenish sort of color. It's not exactly a white. And I think it really shows off the textures and everything really well. So I'm really excited to use this. I hope that video was helpful and fun for you guys. If you want to learn more about me and my studio, you can find me over on Instagram at potterytothepeople. Otherwise, I will see you in the next video. Bye friends.