Video: Materials for Making Pottery Clay

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Raw materials such as silica-bearing materials, aluminum-bearing materials, and flux are used to make a clay body. Find out what raw materials are needed for making pottery clay in this free pottery making video tutorial.

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Video Transcript

In this clip we're going to take a look at some of the raw materials that are going to go into creating our clay body. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of different kinds of clay bodies depending on its intended purpose, but they all have several things in common with each other. If you're formulating a clay body to have specific working or aesthetic properties, you're going to be mixing it based on a recipe similar to making a batch of bread or something like that. All clays have some silica bearing materials in them, they have some alumina bearing materials in them --that's their refractering material that makes it strong -- and they have some flexing agents in them that help it all kind of fuse and melt together a little bit in the kiln so that it can become rigid and dense and vitrified is the technical term. So, for this clay body, it's a simple cone tin stoneware clay body; only has a few ingredients. Now, it's beyond the scope of this, the time we have here for me to give you a comprehensive look at all the possible materials that can go into all the variations on these recipes, and there are a lot of variations. A simple internet search will pull up quite a few different recipes for you to experiment with. This is a simple buff-colored stoneware body. It has some Cedar Heights gold arc clay in it, which is a raw clay; has a little bit of all those components -- the refractering and the silica bearing materials, some netholyne cyanide which is one of the flexing agents and helps to glue everything together. The ground silica, which is also known as flint and some hawthorn bond fire clay, which is a refractering material as well, and that's in this barrel here. I also add a little bentonite to the recipe because bentonite is a really sticky clay that helps to bind everything together and give it a little bit more plasticity in the end. Now, all these materials are available from most local ceramic supply stores and, like I said, there's lots of variations on these recipes so substitutions are possible, variations are possible. If you do a little extra reading on that, I'm sure you can come up with something to experiment with.

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Materials for Making Pottery Clay

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