How To Clay Doodle

Have you started doodling yet? We talked about doodling as a drawing technique yesterday, but you know what … you can also doodle with clay! The main objective in clay doodling is to create something unplanned, to let your mind and hands work up a design that comes from unconscious ideas and to follow the patterns that emerge with your directionless play. Like drawing doodles, this kind of clay play can relieve stress and help you break though design problems and the creatives blahs.

These cabochon beads are clay doodles by Jael Thorp. See just how beautiful a bit of clay doodling can be? Jael actually does a lot of clay doodling. Even those pieces she doesn’t list as doodles, such as cane-covered ornaments and extrusions decorated hearts, have a definite doodling feel to them. They are great examples of how limitless this doodling with clay idea is. There aren’t any restrictions as to how you doodle with clay. Use extrusions, bits of clay, cane slices, sheets of clay you take hand tools to or embellishments. It’s about letting the mind and hands go and seeing where they take you.

To see more of Jael’s work, visit her Art Fire shop or her Flickr pages. You can read about her process on her award-winning blog site, “Jael’s Art Jewels Blog.”

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