Black Mountain Paper Clay - Part 1

Black Mountain clay (both the sculpture and potter's variety) from Aardvark is one of my favorite colored traditional clay. I like the deep brown color I get when it's fired to Cone 10 reduction. Most of the time I do not use any glaze on this clay in my sculpture work.

I decided to make a paper clay version of it from my left over Black Mountain clay in my studio. This article will be in 3 parts.

Part 1 - Making the pulp
Part 2 - Making the Black Mountain clay slurry
Part 3 - Mixing the pulp and the clay slurry


Part 1 - Making the pulp
The sequence of pictures correspond to the notes on the left side.

1. To make the paper pulp, I decided to use left over paper packing instead of a roll of toilet paper, just because I have them around the house and I wanted to experiment using this material. (first picture)

2. The paper packing was torn up into small pieces and put into a 5 gallon painters bucket. (2nd picture)

3. It was soaked overnight. You can also let it soak for a couple of days, if you like, to facilitate the blending of the paper into pulp. (3rd picture)

4. I used an old hand held immersion kitchen blender to cut up and blend the paper packaging into pulp. Adding more water helped in the blending. This takes a bit of time. I had to do this in batches since I can only go so deep with the immersion blender.

(4th picture)

5. Make sure the paper packaging is completely broken up. To test, mix about a tablespoon of pulp with water in a measuring cup. Stir well. You should not see bits of packaging at all. When all you see is a milky emulsion, then your pulp is good. (last picture)