Essential Clay Sculpting Tools For Beginners and Their Uses

Hi all! We’re talking about all the different clay sculpting tools and their uses. What they look like, what each of them do, and which of them you really need. I do end up painting most of my sculptures – but a good paint job almost always depends on a good finished piece, so I had to be knowledgeable about tools.

You know when you go through your closet one day, one search leads to another, and you discover things you’d forgotten or didn’t know you had?

Well I came across all of my old sculpting tools. They still look as good as they did when I last used them, of course I took good care of them.

I was taking classes and we were required to have a set with all of them included. Some of them I used more than others.

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Prior to then I used to get into air dry clay, for the obvious reason, I wasn’t going to need to worry about having an expensive kiln. My creations would become fully formed in a matter of days – cool, right? I used to have some dark orangy red terra cotta color and some that was a plain slate gray, I liked the terra cotta for coming up with Southwest-inspired designs.

It was pliable, and easy to knead. Now it wasn’t all sunshine and roses – every now and then I would have a piece that would show cracks forming (mainly smaller pieces) but I learned how to remedy that problem.

List of Sculpting Tools

The tools I am abut to show and talk about are good for the air dry variety or the kind that can be fired (specifically, “ceramic clay”.) I use much smaller, daintier tools for polymer clay since I make things that are smaller and I want to focus more on detail.

And now, onto the tools. Pardon my little helper there in the picture; she always gets interested in anything new I trot out of the closet or storage. All of these tools are made for clay work. They are somewhat different from the tools I used to do this work here. I numbered them all, you can read up on the different tools and what they are used for.

1-5 Wooden carving/shaping tools

All of these shaping tools are made of wood, they are used for various shaping maneuvers. Notice how they all have different shaped ends? Two of them (the third and fourth in the image below) have zigzag edges with which you can create ridges in your pieces.

The ones with oval/roundish ends will, respectively, create smooth details.

I know, you can tell that these tools have a little bit of residue on them; apologies in advance (I did try to clean them off -promise) The ones I numbered 6-10 are simply more wood clay shaping tools in varying size and shapes.

Chances are, you probably won’t need ALL of these tools every time you work -but it’s nice to have a variety of them! Now as long as we are on the subject of cleaning, since they are made of wood, a good thing to use would be a little bit of Murphy’s Oil Soap – rinse them off and spread out on a towel and let dry naturally.

Sometimes you can find shapers made of plastic, which may be easier to wash off after use; I personally like the wooden ones better, but that’s just me. I actually had a plastic shaper snap on me once (to be fair, it was a flat, thin ended one, the ones with ball tips are pretty sturdy.) and there was no way of seaming it back together.

11 – Double ended ribbon tool

(There are also single-ended tools, too)

The ribbon tool is a wooden tool that has hollow stainless steel scoops at both ends and is used for detail work. Sometimes the openings are round and sometimes they’re square; they enable you to carve out hollow areas with neatness and precision. See how this sculptor is making perfectly formed ridges here:

Image credit: Image by Anne Nygard

12 –  Needle tool

This baby is used for very minute details;  for example etching out cross marks for joining coils of clay together as the marks helped “rough up” the surface better enabling it to stick. I used this tool a good bit. I also like that has a protective cap since it’s sharp.

Sometimes I use it to “etch” my signature into a piece of clay work. (I have always been big on signing my work. You should, too 🙂 Here is a well-made needle tool with good ratings and made of stainless steel.

Image credit: Andy Kelly

13 – Loop tool

It’s similar to the double ended one, but with one end and larger. It is good for hollowing out clay in various areas. As the opening is kind of wide, you can use it to carve out bigger chunks of clay than the ribbon tool.

This would be a good tool to have for larger-scale pieces of work. The last time I used it more seriously, was on a life-sized bust I was working on as a class assignment. It probably took about three weeks to complete.

Here’s a picture of that project. It’s held up very well!

The loop tool was helpful in hollowing out the inside of it (before it was fired, we stuffed crumpled paper into the hollow area to keep its shape intact – a procedure known as “bulking” ) it’s still heavy, though! This thing is a beast – it weighs 24 pounds.

14 – Sponge

Self-explanatory. The yellow round sponge you will get with your kit will come in handy when you are working on something that you probably won’t complete in a day. Moisten it to re-wet parts of a work in progress. This one like many, is synthetic, but there are some sponges made from real sea life matter too.

15 – Potter’s Rib

This little object that kind of looks like a garden spade, or big shark tooth, lol –  with a small hole in the center is used by potters as they work with a slab on the wheel to produce a smoother finish. Now to be honest, I have not ever used a potter’s wheel (I did get to watch it in use though)

If you don’t plan on working with a pottery wheel, you may not need one of these, but it could come in handy nevertheless.

16 – Cutoff wire

This long wire piece with wooden handles is used to cut slabs of clay. You pretty much just take a handle with both hands and “mark” the amount you want to use with the wire to cut that part off.

17 – Scraper

This device is made of metal and works kind of like the potter’s rib, only it may produce a cleaner edge around the object. It came in handy one time when I accidentally spilled some paint – normally I would have just grabbed a plastic knife for that, but I digress 🙂

Use it when you are close to the finished stage of your clay project, to refine the surface and smooth it over before letting it dry or firing it.

Well now on to finding a good sculpting tool set!

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This Starter Sculpting Tool Set is Perfect For Beginners

When I did some research today I checked out various tool sets, comparing them with mine, and comparing with others to see which had the most to offer based on quality and which tools were included.

Truth be told you don’t need a gazillion tools to get started, if you have most or all of those in the list above, you will have everything you need. This one here comes with a nice zippered carrying case too!

✅ For less than $20 at the time of writing, you can have all of what you need and none of what you don’t.

This is pretty much identical (or very similar) to the toolkit I got when I first started ceramics classes. Some of them I used more often than others, but if you need a particular tool for the same reason, like I was, you’ll find it all here.

Want to pick out sculpting tools a la carte instead? Or add only the ones you need for your collection? Although Amazon had the best selection of kits, Blick (popular art supply retailer) has lots of singular tools:

The following tools are from Blick’s Art Materials – I am an affiliate of them so any purchase you make through these links I will earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting my work!

Needle Tool for SculptingSet of 3 Ribbon ToolsWooden Sculpting Tools

And now, just for grins…here is one of my old early projects from school.  This is a tissue box. I attempted to do a little bas-relief (a raised, two-dimensional carved design approach) with the front designs. Afterward I applied glaze to different areas (no painting involved – this was a kiln fired object)

I also blinged it up a little (much later on…)

Good luck with your endeavors! And let me know in the comments if you have any experience with one of these tools you’d like to share. Thanks!