Quickly I began to increase their size. I explored coil-built forms – starting with a paper pattern, then adding half-inch hand-rolled coils in layers. Every two or three layers, I would join the coils together using fingers, then smooth inner and outer surfaces with a rib tool. Here’s an early experiment.

This construction technique was not only laborious, getting the shape I wanted turned out to be difficult. In the sequence above, notice the inner portion of the spiral becoming increasingly skinny as the walls rose higher – not at all what I was going for. On the next iteration, I adjusted the initial pattern to produce a more uniform final result.

The relationship between the initial pattern defining the bottom of the form and the final geometry of the form as seen from above turned out to surprisingly complicated. And the odd angles where walls meet was tricky (notice the second image in top row above)

I decided that draping soft slabs of clay over hump molds might be a better approach. Hump molds are typically made of plaster, a material that held little appeal to me. Although plaster is well suited to making multiples of a particular shape – it’s durable, and easy to use – I want the flexibility to make one or two of the same shape, then change it up. Plaster do mines not support this; it’s heavy and bulky, creating storage issues. It’s also rather expensive.

I had recently attended a sand castle festival in Fort Meyers, Florida with my sister, so I naturally had sand in mind as a possible material. The variety of forms and the expressive of the sand sculptures was truly impressive! I liked the easy workability of the material as well as the ease of reuse. However, I had concerns how to transfer from the mold to the clay. How was I going to keep the sand out of the clay? How was I going to retain details of the mold? And how could I keep the sand castles from collapsing during the transfer?

My first thought was to use the sand as a stepping-stone to creating the “real” mold out of paper mache. Paper mache molds would avoid the pitfalls I was envisioning for sand, were lightweight and inexpensive, and furthermore could be easily stored and reused. For my first experiment, I chose a sand-castlely shape about fifteen inches across. The mold came out well, and worked well (I didn’t save anything I made with this mold, so no pictures). However, this method was time consuming and slow – several days were required, with hours of carefully laying strips of paper to conform to the shape interspersed with long drying intervals.

The next experiment was using a sand mold directly, with thin plastic between the sand and the clay. I spent a long time researching types of plastic, seeking something with a lot of stretch to ensure that the plastic wouldn’t keep the clay from conforming to indentations in the shape. I even bought a roll of industrial-strength wrapping material that was supposed to be much more stretchy than saran wrap. This turned out to be a bust – the plastic was very hard to work with since it sticks to itself, and is not nearly as stretchy as I imagined. In the end, the thinnest painter’s plastic drop cloth that I could find at the hardware store worked just fine!

Here’s the construction sequence for the first successful sand-castle molding that I did. I had a spiral/sun pattern in mind, which I sketched on paper; it’s about 20 inches across. I covered the paper in thin plastic, to keep it dry, and then used the pattern to build up the mold with damp sand. I made sure the sand was wet enough to hold its shape, but not so wet that it leaked water; throughout the process, I occasionally misted the mold using a spray bottle. As I worked, I kept the sand well-tamped, and added, removed, and shaped the sand using my hands and a few clay tools such as ribs, wooden carvers, and a paddle.

Once the mold was finished, I draped it in plastic. I rolled out a 5/16″ slab of clay, and laid it over the plastic. From here, the clay gets worked just as with any drape mold – working from the center out, pressing the clay into the mold using slow, gentle stroking motions with my fingers. The sand mold is surprisingly firm; I’ve had very little problem with the molding process distorting the form. Once the molding was completed, I trimmed the clay, leaving a fairly generous edge for reinforcement.

Now the clay is allowed to dry to leather hard. It’s important that it be fairly stiff to prevent sagging or tearing when lifting the clay off the mold. If I’m in no hurry, I’ll let it air-dry, but using a heat gun to speed the process is something I do often, and works well. When sufficiently stiff, the form can be carefully flipped onto foam rubber, and the backside worked. I always add some reinforcement before trimming the edge. In this case, I added a couple of layers of coils – well slipped and scored, and carefully joined – to not only reinforce the edge, but to accentuate the dimensionality of the piece by having the edge roll under. Notice that this last step allowed me to introduce an undercut, which is not possible with the mold directly; if I did that on the mold (if I could even get a mold to hold shape), there would be no way to lift the clay off the mold!

Here are a couple more early experiments with spiral shapes.

The organic shape below was an initial design for a music synthesizer. I made a couple of impressions off the same mold, then decided to revise the shape to better support inclusion of controls. It was very easy to rework the mold and make an additional set of related-but-different clay forms. Notice the subtle differences between the form on the far right, and the pair to the left of it.

When I made the leap into creating figurative forms, the sand molds really began to shine! Here’s a sequence of creating a fish/dragon head (about 21 inches).

The sand castles work well for adding parts to a sculpture in progress. Here, I’m adding a collar to a dragon’s head using a paper pattern.

A similar sequence, adding an arm to this creature. Notice in the fourth image how I use a coil to add reinforcement to the edge. Once the coil is fully added and worked into the existing structure, I trim away the surrounding flange, and shape the edge using a surform tool.

Continuing the theme of building a sculpture out of parts. In this case, the tail (two different design attempts shown) and the claw of a lobsterish creature were built with the intention of firing separately, then combining after final glaze firing.