The lamellate structure of clay and the extrusion forming process cause terra cotta ceramic's anisotropic elastic behavior at low strain and may induce gradients of macroscopic mechanical properties. Among other techniques, strain measurements obtained through digital image correlations were used to locally characterize transverse isotropic elastic behavior. Kinematic field measurements on small specimens were also compared with fields derived from three-dimensional finite element computations in order to check the consistency of the local characterization procedure.