All of my colored clay is made from scratch. It starts with a recipe of dry clay powders—similar to a baking recipe—that I mix with water in a 30-gallon trash can to create a large batch of liquid clay. From there, I pull smaller amounts, blend in mason stains to create custom colors, and use the resulting slip in two ways: as a paintable material and poured onto plaster slabs to dry into wedgeable colored clay.

My designs begin in a few different ways. Sometimes I sketch with paper and pencil, other times I start digitally or with collage. No matter the starting point, everything ends up in Adobe Illustrator, where I experiment with color and separate each design into printable layers.

Those layers become custom stencils, cut from Graft Edge Stencil Film using a PrismCut vinyl cutter. I use these stencils to print onto flat slabs of clay using my thickened colored slip. The process is similar to screen printing—imagery is built from back to front, one stencil at a time. When the stencil is lifted, the clay slip leaves behind bold, cutout-like shapes. Most of my pieces feature between 4 and 8 printed layers per side, front and back.

Once the printing is complete, the slab is typically too dry to form. At this point, I gently rehydrate the slab by placing it between two damp cloths. After some time, the clay becomes soft and flexible again, ready to be shaped into its final form.