Fall Camp 2022 – Mud Week

Our Fall Art Camp 2022 – Mud Week was a huge success! Thank you to all the amazing students who joined us for a week filled with clay! This Fall Camp our lessons focused around the entire process of working with clay. Starting with wet clay, learning how to hand build, (slip, score, and attach!) letting pieces dry out to bone dry, and finally loading them into our kilns! Students learned all about how our kilns work and got to see our operations behind the scenes in our processing room.

At the beginning of each day students drew inspiration into their journals before starting their projects!

And the results turned out fantastic! In this project, students created two pinch-pots, then attached, and made a closed form ball, making sure each piece had a hole in the bottom and was hollow inside to allow air to escape the piece when being fired. Working with clay can be very tricky, but these students excelled when it came to paying attention to all the clay knowledge we introduced!

A big part of Mud Week is also giving the students the chance to experience throwing clay on the wheel. Each day they practiced a new step, staring with centering the clay, then moving on to pulling up the walls slowly, and lastly creating a finished piece!

The sample projects we created for inspiration were all fall-themed, but we always encourage students to get creative and make something that represents you! The last day of camp, after working on all pieces, we celebrated with a costume part on our back patio, filled with games, treats, and hydro dipping pumpkins!

To end a fantastic week of camp we showed students how to hydro-dip pumpkin, using water and paint. This technique creates a cool marble-like effect using fun colors.