How to prepare your ceramic sculptures for firing in a kiln tutorial

Hello, today I'll show you all the steps involved in preparing a ceramic sculpture for firing in a kiln, including what materials you'll need and some key things to keep in mind. These are the materials you need. A ceramic tool kit, which at minimum includes a loop tool, a wire cutter and a scraper. And some sort of scoring tool. If you don't know where to get these tools, I have provided links to some alternatives that I think are good. These links do go to my Amazon affiliate store, which means I earn a small commission if you purchase any of them through these links. First, start by deciding where you will need to create hollow spaces and where the walls of the ceramic will be. If your sculpture is small to medium sized and less complex, opening it up in only one place is usually enough. However, if your sculptures are larger or have a lot of pressure points, you typically want to open them up in more than one place, in which case I would absolutely recommend that you first make a sketch of your design and plan out where to make these cuts. Since my sculpture is on the smaller side, I decided to skip the sketch and just make a decision. In my experience, pieces tend to adhere better to each other if you can use gravity to help push the parts together. For that reason, I decided to open my sculpture up with a diagonal cut along its back. Before you open your sculpture up, you should also determine whether you need to give your sculpture some extra support. This will be needed if you think opening your sculpture will make parts of it topple over or if it will put too much pressure on fragile parts of the sculptures. For example, my dog sculpture has two thin, fragile legs, which are at high risk of breaking if more pressure is placed on them than there already is. For that reason, I built several clay bridges that would help support the sculpture while I hollowed it out. Keep in mind that adding the support is not always necessary. For example, a sculpture of a human head don't have the same fragile pressure points and won't likely need this extra support. In other words, it's up to you to decide what your design needs. And it takes a little bit of thinking and it's not kind of a one mold fits all. You're now ready to open your sculpture with a wire cutter. Be as gentle as you can and avoid pressure that will morph the shape of your sculpture if you can. Then take out your loop tool and use it to carve out the insides of the piece. I like to start making a hole with a larger loop tool first, then switch to a smaller one as I get closer to the outer walls. Here, it is very important to not make the walls too thick or too thin as both can cause cracking. I usually aim to make mine about an inch or maybe just a smudge thinner. If you have parts of the sculpture that is already thinner than an inch, I don't try to hollow them out. For that reason, I left the legs of my dogs as well as part of its face solid. When you're done hollowing out your sculpture, use a scraper and your hands smooth out the interior of the piece. This will give it more stability as you press out some of the air inside there. Before you put the sculpture back together, make sure to slip and score both sides. Scoring is when you take some sort of tool. I'm using a scoring tool here, but you can use a needle or even a toothbrush and you scratch the surfaces. Slip is a mixture of water and clay that functions kind of like a glue to make the sides adhere to each other. Then you just put the sculpture back together again and clean up any smudges that may have appeared through the handling. Lastly, and after you're done with this hollowing out, make sure that it dries out completely before firing. As we all know, or at least as we all know if we have tried ceramics, ceramics can be tricky business. This guide was meant to help you avoid some pitfalls and hopefully ensure that your ceramics sculptures come out beautiful and crack free. Having said that, there are so many different aspects that goes into ceramics and sometimes things simply break even if you think you did everything right. If this happens to you, please don't feel discouraged. It happens to all of us and if you keep at it, the rewards when things do come out right are going to be so worth it. I hope you found this tutorial useful and if you did, please consider giving a thumbs up and leave a comment. It really helps our channel out a lot. Thank you!