Tips for sculpting chunky little figurines that survive the kiln

I make chubby animals too, mostly round frogs and a very wide badger, and the hollowing part is what took me the longest to figure out. I actually build mine hollow from the start instead of solid then carving out, pinching two bowl-shaped halves and joining them with slip while still soft. Walls stay even that way and I never have to guess how thick the clay is. The seam needs to firm up a little before I keep shaping though, or it bulges right out where the two halves meet. On the leg props, my one change is dusting them with alumina hydrate before the bisque. I skipped that on my first try and a prop stuck itself to the underside of a frog and I spent an evening with a grinding stone regretting my life choices. Slow ramp through the early cones is exactly right, I agree there. My kiln controller lets me set that so easily I forget some people watch it manually. Faces are where I went wrong the most. My first frog had eyes so far apart and so detailed that my husband said it looked haunted. Now I do simple dots and the nose barely suggested at all, and they actually sell. The sketch at real size on paper tip is something I wish I had heard two years ago, I just eyeballed it straight onto the clay forever.

I'd push back on the hollow-from-the-start thing though. Pinched halves still let you build up a thicker belly without realizing it, expecially once you start smoothing and reshaping, and that's exactly where my last frog blew a chunk off in the bisque. I hollow from solid now and I can feel how thick the walls are as I go. Also had the same prop-stuck disaster, but I just kiln-wash the bottom of mine instead of dusting every wad. Anyone else notice thier joined halves want to sag sideways during shaping if the body is really wide?

The drying stage trips people up too and nobody seems to talk about it much. I lost a chunky pig to uneven drying before I figured it out. Now I cover the whole thing loosely in plastic and let it dry over a week instead of leaving the bottom exposed to air. Heavy bases especially, they'd crack right along the thickest part for me. I also flip them upside down partway through once they're firm enough to handle, so the base isn't always the wet side. Slower, sure, but I haven't had a spontaneous pig exlosion since.

Funny reading this, we were doing chubby beasts back in the 80s too, only we built them over crumpled newspaper armatures and let the paper burn out in the bisque. Crude but it worked, and you never forgot to hollow because the newspaper did it for you. Clay body matters more than people think on these chunky pieces too. A coarse groggy body shrugs off the thick belly and thick legs, a smooth porcelain one is just begging to split on you. I learned that the hard way with a very fat bear that came out of the bisque looking like it had surgery.