Review on 🎨 Master the Craft and Art of Clay: Unleash Your Creative Potential by Amanda Castillo

This is a great book for anyone wanting to work with clay. The book is clearly written for prospective and current studio potters. The book was originally published in 1992 and is now in its fourth edition. And having mentioned some security issues, there are plenty of tutorials on sculpting clay and the tools to use. There are manual building sections: pinch, serpentine and panel building. Then there is a lot about the technique of "throwing" the clay on the potter's wheel with good photo sequences. It takes a lot of skill and practice! As the author says, the wheel is very sensual, rhythmic and hypnotic. Peterson always warns us about proper handling of clay: if you attack it one way and then hit it in the same place from a different direction, you can find cracks in the fire caused by the stresses placed on it. It's just wrong to recycle clay. However, many potters and artists like to create many pieces with the same general shape. And that means making plaster molds and using them and making molds, so Peterson shows us that in detail. A discussion of decoration follows. This includes artistry and visualization. There is a good discussion of clays and an explanation of what faience, earthenware and porcelain are. We are shown different types of clay bodies including terra sigillata and raku (a process in which a clay body is mixed with a small amount of dirt to make it porous enough to avoid thermal shock). And there's a wonderful chapter on icing. After that there is a lot of information about kilns and firing, including the use of cones, Inconel tubes and pyrometers to measure temperature. The technical section explains how glaze calculations are made and there are coefficient of expansion charts, frit data and color charts. Tone and glaze combinations and much more. There is a historical overview that includes a discussion of the studio potter movement and the contributions of Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada to it. And we see some work by Maria Martinez and Lucy Lewis in Pueblo Indian pottery. There is also an excellent portfolio of interesting work. I especially like some of the low fire. This is a very useful resource and I highly recommend it.