Mastering the fundamentals and various approaches to clay modeling is challenging and rewarding. Students enrolled in this course learn about clay modeling techniques via step-by-step tutorials and creative challenges. Enjoy learning how to be creative with clay modeling!
| Course Outline Lesson 1: The Human Being Lesson 2: Animals Lesson 3: Flowers and Plants Lesson 4: Geometric Forms Lesson 5: Free and Imaginative Forms | Supplies needed
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Rudolf Steiner points out that the main purpose of pedagogical modeling is for teachers to make a start and have their students activate their hands regularly in creating forms. The forming and form-sensing activity is paramount, regardless of the malleable material used—“even street mud if it is the only thing available, it doesn’t matter!”
Observation of young children playing for lengthy times shaping cool, wet mud or sand or cold snow shows us what a primal impulse sculptural activity is for human beings. Our hands want to reshape and transform the earth.
Plentiful earth materials like sand, dirt, and clay lend themselves naturally and readily to modeling activity outdoors and indoors. Steiner emphasized the artistic value of young children “handling clay” and even “struggling with [such] outer materials.” Their exertion helps them develop willpower and connect actively with the world. In his words:
" ... Whatever subject is being taught, the child’s inherent impulse to play, which is an intrinsic part of his or her makeup, can be guided into artistic activities. And when children enter the first and second grades, they are perfectly able to make this transition. However clumsy children of six or seven may be when modeling, painting, or finding their way into music and poetry, if teachers know how to permeate their lessons with artistry, even young children as miniature sculptors or painters can begin to have the experience that human nature does not end at the fingertips, that is, at the periphery of the skin, but flows out into the world. The adult being is growing in children whenever they put their being into handling clay, wood, or paints. In these very interactions with materials, children grow, learning to perceive how closely the human being is interwoven with the fabric of the world. These [artistic channels] permit a freedom of inner activity while at the same time forcing the children to struggle with outer materials, as we have to do in adult work."
Observation of young children playing for lengthy times shaping cool, wet mud or sand or cold snow shows us what a primal impulse sculptural activity is for human beings. Our hands want to reshape and transform the earth.
Plentiful earth materials like sand, dirt, and clay lend themselves naturally and readily to modeling activity outdoors and indoors. Steiner emphasized the artistic value of young children “handling clay” and even “struggling with [such] outer materials.” Their exertion helps them develop willpower and connect actively with the world. In his words:
" ... Whatever subject is being taught, the child’s inherent impulse to play, which is an intrinsic part of his or her makeup, can be guided into artistic activities. And when children enter the first and second grades, they are perfectly able to make this transition. However clumsy children of six or seven may be when modeling, painting, or finding their way into music and poetry, if teachers know how to permeate their lessons with artistry, even young children as miniature sculptors or painters can begin to have the experience that human nature does not end at the fingertips, that is, at the periphery of the skin, but flows out into the world. The adult being is growing in children whenever they put their being into handling clay, wood, or paints. In these very interactions with materials, children grow, learning to perceive how closely the human being is interwoven with the fabric of the world. These [artistic channels] permit a freedom of inner activity while at the same time forcing the children to struggle with outer materials, as we have to do in adult work."
Caroline von Heydebrand (1886-1938), one of the twelve founding class teachers in the first Waldorf school who practiced modeling and the use of beeswax in her classroom, poignantly described its pedagogical implications:
"Just as the young child digs and plays in his sand pile or in the earth, making little men and animals or baking mud pies, so a little later does the older child occupy his creative imagination with more permanent materials. The nearer he approaches the change of teeth, the more markedly do the formative forces reveal themselves—since their activity in this change of teeth is now, as it were, concluded—in the impulse the child feels to use his creative powers of soul in fashioning forms, in painting, and in modeling. And just as the child Jesus [according to legend] was happy when he made his cuckoo-birds out of the moist, clayish earth which he found in the lanes where he played, and with which he made them look alive as he patted them into shape, so is the other child now satisfied also if he has a bit of loam or clay which he finds perhaps near at hand. If only he can make something, he will look for his material till he finds it. On the other hand, if his parents can give him beeswax, for example, to model with, then in the very act of kneading this noble material, his creative will—working as it does in the circulation of the blood and warming his hands till they are all aglow—makes itself felt even to the very tips of his fingers. Thus not only is the skillfulness of his hands increased, but his imaginative capacity is also aroused and nurtured. For we know how similarly the movements and gestures of both hands and feet react when the child is learning to speak: how they help him to learn, to form ideas, and to think. .. .In his play, first of all, is the child’s creative activity developed. Later, it shows itself in his happy enjoyment, his eagerness to recreate in his own way the beauty of the world. .The road lead[s] from a healthy, wisely-directed play-impulse in childhood to a consciously dutiful activity in mature life."
Similarly, Cecil Harwood (1898-1975), a founding teacher of the first Waldorf school in the English-speaking world, characterized the child’s early desire to shape objects with the hands as a profoundly organic, artistic need:
" ... young children ... need all the more to be given artistic food because the desire is still, so to speak, organic. Look at the imagination of children, their make-believe games, their wide-eyed love of stories, their uncontrollable desire to paint and draw, the itching of their fingers to shape and model, even if they have no better material than dirty clay from a backyard garden, or wax pulled fearfully from the melting wall round the candle flame. .Painting, modeling, acting, rhythmical movement—these must become for these young children the very way of knowledge. If you succeed in teaching in this way, you are uniting what is nowadays divided—the forces of the head with the forces of feeling and movement. You are strengthening the binding point of thought and feeling and will."
Clay with the right moisture is the quintessential, archetypal earth medium for modeling at all ages 3 to 103+. It gives way to hand pressure with just the right resistance and at the same time holds its form wonderfully. Clay’s water-permeated texture becomes almost magically flesh-like in feel and look. It is no wonder many ancient cultures associated it with the creation of the human being!
Clay also lends itself to handling good-sized pieces and “whole-hand modeling.” All parts of the threefold hand can be fully engaged in the process: concave palm (feeling), fingers (thinking/nerve sense), and the lower, very muscular base before the wrist and muscular thumb (will).
"Just as the young child digs and plays in his sand pile or in the earth, making little men and animals or baking mud pies, so a little later does the older child occupy his creative imagination with more permanent materials. The nearer he approaches the change of teeth, the more markedly do the formative forces reveal themselves—since their activity in this change of teeth is now, as it were, concluded—in the impulse the child feels to use his creative powers of soul in fashioning forms, in painting, and in modeling. And just as the child Jesus [according to legend] was happy when he made his cuckoo-birds out of the moist, clayish earth which he found in the lanes where he played, and with which he made them look alive as he patted them into shape, so is the other child now satisfied also if he has a bit of loam or clay which he finds perhaps near at hand. If only he can make something, he will look for his material till he finds it. On the other hand, if his parents can give him beeswax, for example, to model with, then in the very act of kneading this noble material, his creative will—working as it does in the circulation of the blood and warming his hands till they are all aglow—makes itself felt even to the very tips of his fingers. Thus not only is the skillfulness of his hands increased, but his imaginative capacity is also aroused and nurtured. For we know how similarly the movements and gestures of both hands and feet react when the child is learning to speak: how they help him to learn, to form ideas, and to think. .. .In his play, first of all, is the child’s creative activity developed. Later, it shows itself in his happy enjoyment, his eagerness to recreate in his own way the beauty of the world. .The road lead[s] from a healthy, wisely-directed play-impulse in childhood to a consciously dutiful activity in mature life."
Similarly, Cecil Harwood (1898-1975), a founding teacher of the first Waldorf school in the English-speaking world, characterized the child’s early desire to shape objects with the hands as a profoundly organic, artistic need:
" ... young children ... need all the more to be given artistic food because the desire is still, so to speak, organic. Look at the imagination of children, their make-believe games, their wide-eyed love of stories, their uncontrollable desire to paint and draw, the itching of their fingers to shape and model, even if they have no better material than dirty clay from a backyard garden, or wax pulled fearfully from the melting wall round the candle flame. .Painting, modeling, acting, rhythmical movement—these must become for these young children the very way of knowledge. If you succeed in teaching in this way, you are uniting what is nowadays divided—the forces of the head with the forces of feeling and movement. You are strengthening the binding point of thought and feeling and will."
Clay with the right moisture is the quintessential, archetypal earth medium for modeling at all ages 3 to 103+. It gives way to hand pressure with just the right resistance and at the same time holds its form wonderfully. Clay’s water-permeated texture becomes almost magically flesh-like in feel and look. It is no wonder many ancient cultures associated it with the creation of the human being!
Clay also lends itself to handling good-sized pieces and “whole-hand modeling.” All parts of the threefold hand can be fully engaged in the process: concave palm (feeling), fingers (thinking/nerve sense), and the lower, very muscular base before the wrist and muscular thumb (will).
