Building and Cleaning a Vase or Bottle Form with the Pinch and Coil Methods

[Music] in this video I want to show how to create a pinch vase or a bottle by pinching a cup and then adding some coils I lasso and by showing how I would put some texture design onto it when it's leather hard I have some examples here for my students we are doing a raku project where they're making small bottles or vases not to be used with food and I have the different stages this is the first stay stage usually they can pinch and then add some coils all in the same day form it into the approximate shape that they want it to be in this has been flattened with a paddle which I will show after the first day we allowed to get leather hard and then we will start cleaning the form with sheriff worms you can see there's a lot of share form texture on here this will help to define the form a little bit more and get rid of a whole bunch of lumps will be evening the top on that second day the third stage or the third day is we will start ribbing this and perhaps scraping off the sure form marks using the stainless steel rib after the stainless steel rib then we have final smoothing with yellow and red ribs now once it's finally cleaned then will come any design work if my students want to do texture or some sort of carved design on the surface besides glaze we are using raku clay this is a standard 2 3:9 clay body this is fresh off the block but I'm going to go ahead and wedge it up a little bit so this 239 is a heavily grog clay it's more heavily ground than any clay that my students have used thus far it is a stoneware type of clay so it can go cone 5 6 which we use cone five and six glazes in my studio or what we are specifically specifically using it for it will be the raku firing process which is a low firing process where we use raku glazes and use the outdoor kiln I can have another video where I talk more about the raku process so just like we did in the pinch cup video we start with a ball and I do recommend a ball about the size of the fist this is probably I would estimate it's probably about a pound maybe a pound in a quarter I start by pushing my thumb into the middle of the ball and then I pinch the bottom now just like we did in the pinch Cup video previously we will be pinching the bottom tooth in the bottom and then rotate it and gradually move up the sides so as I do this my fingers move up the side so the bottom part is already pinched thin and then I move up the sides it's very important that you not leave the bottom too thick on these that is probably the most common mistake that my students make if the bottom is too thick it will end up by having problems drying now I'm going for about finger thick right now notice that it has a round bottom I have not been doing it on the table when students do it on the table and they rotate and they pinch it often goes very wide low and fat we are doing a bottle or vase so we are going to be adding on some height if I wanted to keep it this size of course I could just thin it all and make it all much thinner I don't have to add coils at all but I do want to show you I can add coils inform it so I'll pinch a little bit more and just when you squeeze in a little bit like this you have to be aware if you are causing any creasing remember that you want to work with a pinch pot rather quickly if you're working slowly your clay will dry out and the more dries and then you pinch it the more likely it will be to form cracks so as I just brought that in a little bit more narrow I blend over any creases that I visibly see as soon as they are there don't wait and try to blend them later you want to do it immediately I'm going to tap the bottom and give myself a nice stable base now if I wanted to make added height say like I did on one of these you can see the relative size I'm going to not a coil when you add a coil you will always want to prep the surface by scoring and slipping now you have a couple different tools that you could use for scoring and slipping it for my students of course I have the Kemper serrated rib there are links to these in the video description this is the scratch wire brush which I really like some of my students who had mrs. Valentine as their ceramics teacher in the past might know these as the witch's broom and you could use a standard needle tool if you would like I just decided to use the serrated rib because it was fast now to add a coil I recommend that you keep the coils thick and fat when you roll a little bit the big trick is take the ends of the coil and kind of rotate them slightly opposite you don't want to do it so much that you're going to break it but you will get these little diagonal patterns when you have rotated when you rotate it because the the twist helps to keep it round okay it's just a little bit nicer to build with a round coil rather than when that's all flat now when I build with a coil I usually go with something about its thick as my thumb even though I'm going to be thinning it it will give me a little bit more height so when I add it it gives me a little extra height that I can pull up now scoring you could use vinegar you could use prepared slip or in the case of this I am quite simply using water when you brush water onto the surface of squirt clay it's hard to see I know my hand but it makes it that's a milky substance so it actually creates its own slip by adding water to the scoring and kind of lightly brushing it on it creates slip now I place this on top but you can see how it's wrapping around if I want this to be an even coil I'm going to cut it and I like to cut it a wee bit at a diagonal that way I know that they're going to overlap when I put the ends together little slip on that really you only need to slip one surface then I will blend together the end of this coil and now for the blending I'm going to take a dry finger I recommend that your fingers are dry when you do this if it's wet it's just gonna slide all over you need to have a little bit of friction to help blend this together if you would prefer not to use your finger you could use a blending tool I really like these wooden knives again this is a Kemper wood a knife I will put a link in the video description and then I will also blend on the interior again you could use your finger or a blending and a tool the link that I will put in the video description will also be a Google Doc a live Google Doc where I put links to all of my favorite tools that I might use that you can get on Amazon alright so I am blending the interior and the exterior so you cannot visibly see a line you do not want to see a line of where the coil was placed on there once you have that blended if you need to squeeze it in a little bit more you can I will just do one more coil I'll take the rest of my clay kind of push it together my clay is nice and plastic right now then I'm going to twist the ends opposite and I usually do see enough when I roll I find it easier the coils doesn't really have to be pretty because as I add it on I'm blending it so if I have loops if I have some gapping or creasing it's not going to be visible once I get it blended same thing going to score both add it on slice the ends you don't have to attach a coil like this but if you're trying to keep it even as you're building it is helpful that you could do that blend the ends together and blend the coil to the pot once you have the coil attached then we can begin to create the form a little bit more the way that you have designed it now with those coils attached I do want to do just a little bit more thorough blending again you could use your finger you could use the wooden tool and I just really kind of want to work in the the seams and also any of the chunks that maybe I've smeared around I just want to work that in now once you get everything thoroughly blended you're really ready to really start forming the form however you might want it to be if you would like to have something it's easier to transform if you'd like to have something that tapers in at the bottom comes in at the top or even has say the corners like this I will show you how to do that so the first thing that I want to do is just take my fingers and kind of gently squeeze in now again when you're squeezing in you have to look for vertical creasing which begins to happen and blend over the vertical creasing immediately because it's a common occurrence you're squishing it in and you might get some creasing there so you just want to blend over that check on the exterior to to see if you have anything like that now you really should try to get the form squeezed on the day that you build it if you wait 24 hours it will start to firm up a little bit and it's gonna be a little harder to shape it okay so I'm bringing that in this is irregular it's a little bit bigger than I would want it to be I can of course make that a little bit more even in height when it gets closer to leather hard [Music] okay I want to look and try to make sure that the interior of this looks around --is-- if I wanted it to be round of course if you want a different shape you could but you want it to look uniform and purposeful so after I have squeezed that in I do want to try to kind of correct the interior of it now to shape this bottom to make this more narrow there's a simple tool that we can use as a trick and I'm my goal is to make it more narrow but if I just squeeze it straight in I'll probably end up with a really thick bottom down there so I'm going to not only squeeze it in but I'm going to lengthen it some as I do this so I'm going to use a paddle there are paddles of different sizes and shapes that I have in my classroom and again I will put some links to these in the in the Google Doc that I have so I'm going to tap and pull so if you can see the action of the paddle that I'm doing if I slow it down tapping and pulling now you want to do it not just in one place but you want to go around so as I do this hopefully you can see it's elongating over here on this side where I've been tapping it now I'm going to tap this side and pull it down and I'm just going to keep rotating it and pulling again the key is I'm not just smacking it straight in if I smack it straight and it's gonna concentrate all that clay into very thick bottom I want to stretch and pull the paddle into the direction in the direction that I want the clay to stretch so tapping and pulling and again keep rotating it one of the things that some of my kids do sometimes unconsciously is they just our doing one side only if you are doing one side only you're going to have a really lopsided piece okay so this looks much a much more graceful it's a thinner than it was now at this point it is a little uneven on the bottom and I'm not terribly worried about it but I do want to set it down there we go okay again the upper edge I can always sure form later to get it even if it bugs you right now certainly you can take a little knife trim off some of the extra there we go I can trim some of that off and then I can always clean it up and share form it later now I want to look for uniformity of things so like the angle as it comes out here I want to try to make sure that the angle is going to look even that it's not you know sticking way out more on one side than another so I want to try to look for uniformity of that and I want to look for uniformity along the shoulders of it so as I look like along these angles I want to see well where is it sticking out more maybe it's sticking out more here and it's flatter over here so perhaps I need to get in there and kind of push out the shoulder a little bit more okay all right now the next thing that I want to show you is if you would like to do something where it's the shape is altered quite a bit you could use a paddle to do that this form would be fine as is but I want to show you how I can perhaps put corners on it so if let's say for instance I just want to make a corner like maybe around here in here I want to make two corners I'm going to take the paddle and I'm gonna tap pulling toward the corner so I'm gonna tap going this direction and then I'll tap coming up so as I tap I'm tapping the corner so I'm flattening it so you can kind of see the corner starting and then on this side I'm tapping and pulling upward so every time I'm paddling it's not going straight in I'm pulling it so same thing over here I'm gonna pull this one and then I tap upward so basically you're pulling the paddle in two directions until the two directions would meet and that would be the corner okay so there is the corner on that this can seriously be refined when we go to do the sure forming but this will definitely help if you paddle it a wee bit it'll help to get you into the approximate form so you have a little less sure forming to do if you wanted to square it you can certainly square it or make it a rectangle the one thing that I do tell my students because we are doing raku is we are not doing any slab work with the raku we're doing this pinch and Coyle method because the raku and the slab just tends to be a little bit more fragile so you can see I have four corners I have a corner in each of these hopefully that's visible and you guys can see that okay so this is pretty much the end of the first day I have everything blended over I have creases blended over I have the form approximately data that the way that I want it to and this is ready to get leather hard I'm going to allow this to dry get leather hard so this would be equivalent to this this is day one then I'll come back and after it's dry I'll show you in the next bit how I do the cleaning that cleaning and refining [Music] since the last segment of the video I have allowed this to get letter hard for my students we have little pieces of plastic that I cut that we just put over the rim kind of press it over the rim when it's plastic we'll put the plastic over the top when it goes in the damp cabinet so the rest of it will dry out a bit more evenly it protects the rims the rim does it dry too much when it gets to the leather hard point usually 24 hours in my classroom then we're ready for the cleaning part now the cleaning part my two favourite tools are going to be the mud tools shredders this is a rasp type of a tool Stanley makes a version called Asher form but I really do like the mud tools this small mud tools shredder is bent and to end but it is flat side to side this long tapered one is bent side to side if you can see that the side to side curves allow you to use the edge and to get up in curved areas where you might have slices now these sure forms are designed to cut in one direction only so it's similar to say a cheese grater I usually like to use it in the pole direction and when you do it you can see you get some lines there that are created but that's not to worry because I'm going to show you some tools where you can get rid of those now the goal of Asher form is you want to get rid of the denting that you might have like up here I have some denting and you want to maybe refine the form a little bit more if it's a little bit thick down there at the bottom you can take off a little bit more and one of the tricks that I tell my students when they do it sometimes if you're trying to go around try to use a diagonal motion okay and that will help you have perhaps a little bit more of a round surface a diagonal motion will also help to kind maybe give you someone criss cross line so if you do have some denting that it helps a little bit more easily to get rid of the denting I'm anticipating that there's a little bit of thickness down here that I'm going to want to take off so I'm going to just go a little bit greater down here take off some of the thickness all the way around and one of the things that I'm looking for is I want to try to make sure that my walls do look even so you know if it's going to be around pot I want to make sure that it's a circle on the bottom not something oddly shaped okay I feel like I have shaped my bottom okay I'm pleased with that result and now I'm going to work on the upper part now in order to get this curve up here I don't really want to use this shirt form because I'm afraid if I use this show room I'll just have some gouges from this edge because it won't accommodate the curve so that's when I switched to this curved one the the tapered long shredder and for this I definitely have a diagonal pole when I pull on this I am actually pulling diagonally across the shredder it helps to prevent having just like a groove like they don't like to go straight across because then you get a groove the shape of the shredder but I like to use basically multiple facets of the shredder like I use the very corner I use the bottom and then I use the other corner so I'm doing this to get rid of the denting okay so I just refined the basically that I'm gonna call it the phases of the vase it's a little bit flatter and again that's just a design choice I'm trying to make sure that this looks somewhat uniform the curve around there I do want to do the top now so and I should mention the ones that I showed in the video yesterday like this was the first day when it was plastic now this is what I'm trying to work on right now just the shirt forming the refining the cleaning of the top edge okay so for this when I do the top edge I really just try to do it by eye to make sure that I'm getting it level and one of the key things that I do is I will get my eyes down level with it you can certainly use a turntable if you want I just have mine on my table so as I look across I'm trying to make sure that the top looks level going across okay next I'm going to work on the the outer diameter the inner diameter I'm not too keen on the way that looks it's really big so I'm going to take some off and my goal is I want to make this look perfectly circular from the top and I'm also taking down a little bit of the thickness of the rim I don't want it to be accessible thick now obviously I am using the raku clay that I had mentioned because we're doing a ragu project at school this technique can clearly be done with any sort of clay okay so now that I've kind of refined that outer diameter a little bit now I need to go in there and take off kind of the awkward angle that developed if you're attempting to sure form and it's a little too wet you're going to find that it gums up within the short form so you really want it to be leather hard when it comes off in pieces really like grated cheese okay I'm looking at that from the side and I I like the uniformity that's starting to happen there now for the interior of this I do have at school I have some other ones that are made by sure form and there are actually little tubes that you could use right in here but in lieu of the tube I'm just going to use my one of my favorite Kemper tools this is the wooden tool I tell my kids it's kind of pointy and looks like a pencil this is the one that mrs. Valentine my kids who had mrs. Valentine for first-level might know this she used to call it the Wenzel which I thought was funny so just by using this I'm going to use the edge of this almost as if it's a little rib for scraping and by doing this I can scrape the inner roundness and make sure that it really does look around and it's not like weirdly shaped or oblong so I'm going for the diameter there and then I'm scraping down the basic believe the flange kind of part that sticks out to make sure that that looks of even thickness and angle and has uniformity right there okay next I'm going to take off a little bit of the corner for my students watch sharp things because when it goes in the raku kiln if it gets bumped when it's in the reduction chamber it could chip so I just like to round it a little bit okay so if my students get this far on the second day that's awesome when it's other hard usually that takes them about a class bell now the next day really or the next step is going to be two rib off the share four marks because they're very apparent at this point okay so for ribbing I'm gonna recommend the mud tools little stainless steel scraper by scraping off the clay I can remove all of the sure form lines the idea behind this stainless steel scraper is that I want to remove the sure form marks and this is a very groggy clay so it is a little bit scratchy there I'm not terribly worried about that at this moment but you can clean it off every few strokes it will definitely get a little bit kind of clogged yeah when you are doing curves like this you want to try multiple directions and oh the one key thing is you can flex this this rib if I I'm trying to show it flexed so it kind of contours to the form a little bit more I this baby rib is always my go-to rib after I've sure formed so I'm going to go ahead and sure form the rest of this and then I'll fast forward and come back and show you [Music] I shouldn't mention when I'm doing the little areas like this I often use little small strokes as I keep the rig their bread bent it's not so easy to do long strokes when you're in a little curved area like that it's more of a controlled scraping in a small area [Music] okay now that I pretty much have all those sure form works taken care of now I'm ready to switch to a slightly softer rib so again metal rib gets rid of the sure four marks and then I'm on to this step which is the compression and smoothing of it and I go to the yellow rib next again I'll have links to all of these tools in the video description and I also have a link to a Google Doc a live Google Doc that I update constantly with links to some of my favorite products that are available on Amazon to old studios wise things like that [Music] okay that looks much smoother now with the yellow rim and then for some final smoothing I can take the red rib over it and if your piece is maybe just a little on the dry side you could always dip your rib in a little water and a little little water when your ribbing if it's uh maybe just real groggy and not smoothing before you just try a little bit of moisture okay and that's looking pretty good and smooth and now for the last step is when I would be adding whatever sort of design I might want to this this design is kind of an interesting way I often have people that are asking you how do I do something like that so I'll show something like that on this piece so I will first of all I'll lay out some designs I'll just do some curly Q's and I'll just do it on the flat panels here [Music] all right so I have my design laid out on both sides now for the carving aspect I like to use something like this so these are Kemper mini ribbon tools again I have links to these in the description I am particularly fond of this one this is the ivory 4 to it to my students as the triangle tip tool and there's a small version of it too so there's a big and a little if you can see that okay hopefully you can and then I there's also another Kemper one that is kind of a rectangular one this is sold in a set of many ribbon tools and also there are some Doland ones that I have let's see this is Dolan but these are Kemper so they kind of look somewhat similar and these are really nice ones though they're a little bit fancier so what I'm going to do is start off I want to think about where is the low point and where's the high point so I'm gonna make the line the low point so I'm going to make a line that goes kind of straight in okay and then I'm going to taper it going left and right I'm probably going about an eighth of an inch in depth [Music] okay so after I had the initial line carved a little bit more deeply than I'm gonna go in here and kind of make it a groove shaped sort of like a V so the center line and I originally drew that's the deepest part of it [Music] [Music] [Music] okay now that it's all carved I'm just going to go in there and try to even out some of the edges to get rid of any chunky spots now that I have everything carved I'm going to do a couple final steps with cleaning because this is small and hard to rib I'm going to use a paintbrush and add a little water compress in there and the action back and forth will help to really smooth it and clean it up because this is a heavily grog clay I would not want to sponge I'm just using a paintbrush [Music] [Music] all right so I think the carving is clean enough with the paintbrush I'm not worried about the little brush marks when I glaze over it it's not going to be visible I am going to do one last little bit on the rim I'm gonna add a little moisture and then I'm going to use my fingers as a rib by compressing kind of really smoothing out that opening it's a nice little extra finishing touch that you can do for cleaning that's something like that all right I did not mention that if you have a problem with Rocking it could be because you have maybe if the clay kind of a some convex there and it's coming out you could just take a little loop tool if you have any problem with that and I'm just making a slight indent right in the middle that way if you had something that was sticking out it's not and it it should work well so I hope you found this slightly helpful in learning how we do the pinch pots with a pinch cup and added coils and then shaping and cleaning [Music] you [Music]

Channel: KaransPotsAndGlass

Views: 27,698

Rating: 4.9010601 out of 5

Keywords: vase, bottle, coil, coiling, coils, pinch, pot, pinching, ball, raku, stoneware, earthenware, porcelain, handbuild, handbuilt, paddle, paddling, surform, shredder, shredders, mudtool, Mudtools, rib, ribs, silicone, rubber, grater, rasp, cleaning, building, leatherhard, bisque, fire, fired, plastic, greenware, ceramic, ceramics, clay, pottery, learn, teach, school, beginner, Ceramics I, high school, Mason, Ohio, William Mason, demo, demonstration, student, students, Karan, Karen, witham, walsh, potter

Id: B4NENzRKEH8

Length: 39min 53sec (2393 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019