The material

Five clays, three states

Everything here is one material in different hands. The same clay that sets on a face is the clay that goes on canvas and the clay that fires into a pot. What separates them is water, heat, and what you decide to do with it.

Raw, dry, fired

Raw is damp and grey-pink and darker than you expect. It holds a fingerprint, which is the whole reason anybody has ever made anything out of it.

Dry is chalky and pale — the lightest the clay ever gets. A mask reaches this state on your face, and the cracking you see is the clay giving up its water where you can watch it happen.

Fired is terracotta: warm, saturated, and irreversible. Past about 600°C the clay loses the water held inside its crystal structure and will never soften again, however long you soak it. That is the line between a pot and a puddle.

The five clays

Red clay takes its colour from iron oxide — the same iron that turns a fired pot terracotta. It is an illite, which draws more water than a kaolin and sets firmer on skin.

Rhassoul is stevensite, mined in the Moulouya valley east of Fes. It is the gentlest of the five and the one that has been used on skin and hair the longest.

Rose and white kaolin are two-layer clays: fewer sheets, less charge, far less draw. These are the clays for skin that reddens, and the ones you can use most often.

French green is the strongest draw in the line. Once or twice a week is plenty, and on the oily parts rather than the whole face if your skin runs dry in places.

Calcium bentonite is mostly montmorillonite, a three-layer clay whose sheets prise apart in water to an enormous surface. It is the one in the line that is taken rather than applied.

The same clay, on canvas

Moroccan rhassoul worked onto raw canvas by hand. No brush — the hand is the brush, and the clay dries lighter than it goes on, so you are painting a colour you cannot see yet.

This is studio work, not stock. It is here because it is the same jar: one version sits on a face for ten minutes and the other stays on the cloth.

And on paper

The colouring sheets are the cheapest version of the same idea. Print one and rub actual clay into the paper — it works, and it is what we do.