Tiny Dinos
posted by on April 26, 2026
It has been a little over a year since I first started handbuilding abstract-shaped dinosaurs out of clay at the local pottery studio where my partner is a member. It began with this one piece that a friend of the owner had made and we all coveted.
At a friend’s birthday party at that same studio, I decided to try to handbuild a similar long-necked dinosaur. It’s such a small object, after all. How hard could it be to form such a tiny amount of clay into the right shape?
I was immediately humbled.
After hearing my partner and the studio owner talk about how much they loved and wished they could steal that original dino on the shelf, I decided to try again with more of a plan.
I rolled some speckled clay into an oval and used a needle tool to cut out the spaces betewen the legs. I pinched the legs out into longer points and then gently tapped the body feet-side-down until the feet flattened out into cylinders from cones. I rolled out a cone that I attached in the back for a tail and a long cylinder that I squared off and attached in the…