Help! Why can't I open it in the center?

hi YouTube so we're going back and working on stuff that you know can give beginners issues and how to solve them and how to diagnose them and all that so we did centering yesterday today we're going to talk about the opening of the piece so opening people do lots of different ways people do it with thumbs with with a finger with a whole hand I do it with the side of my finger and my thumb if you haven't seen my other videos check them out before you go on so that you least got a baseline of why I do what I do but in terms of opening it you want elbows anchored and all that you want your thumb next to your fingers and you're going to press down in the center if you're doing this wrong a couple things can happen one clay can be building up keep my fingernail off nice they can be building up on your fingernail because you're too far towards noon towards 12 o'clock or you could be getting a nipple in the middle and that's because you're too far towards 6 o'clock so I'm going to try to do both of those here before I wreck them all the play so pushing over here you push down and clay stick squirts out of the middle that would be pushing too far towards 6 o'clock to get rid of that you push until that pops off and remove it that's an easy one now if you're going across this one's harder for me to do this one always messes up so if you find that you're not centering it's probably because you're pushing towards too far towards 12 o'clock what happens you'll get like an undercut clay will build up on your fingernail to get rid of that you're just going to kind of smooth it out into the rest of the wall and press down and we establish the center so those are both pretty easy things that you can fix it's just being aware of why they're happening and catching them before it becomes too much of an issue um if you're not centered as you're as you're doing this say you've started to open up way before the clay was was centered enough to be actually opening you could get left with an issue that's all bumpy what kind of tuck that in just a second um and well let's go with not deep enough yet so say you get to the point here and you flatten up bottom and you get your needle till you go oh I forgot to check to see how to eat my bottom was and you take your needle tool and you check it and you've got an inch and a half which would make a fantabulous anchor or doorstop but right now you're trying to make us a vase or something you check it you got an inch thick at the bottom you're like aw now what do I do well a lot of people just go right back down and try to Center what happens however if you can see that start tamping here is that you get a second wall to form in the bottom we will go ahead zoom so when you get that second wall to form right here it can cause all sorts so what you want to do is actually start from the wall and press down on the wall and not just in the middle and that will help push that out rather than having it form another wall see there's a shadow that's because the light but it's just the side of my fingers that's dead from the side of my finger back out two steps to autofocus freaking out here so right now let's say it wasn't centered so we'll try to on the center this song to fix a nun southern pot what you want to do is kind of make it into a into like a cone up comb down situation again but I kind of pushing the clay up into a wall and then pushing it back down brush it on you rip it off on your rip it down until it is centered again so you're kind of coating up and coning down in a wall this because this is called tunnel centering and sometimes I'll use this on really large chunks of clay that I'm trying to Center because it's too hard while it's in a cone to get all the clay really mixed up and centered the way I want I'll get a rough centered and then go to do this to get it finally centered and the last thing that a beginner will do is I say to open up the size your sponge in the bottom especially when you're starting and what they'll do they'll get so excited that this is working and they've gotten to this stage and they just keep going and going and now they've got this thing and for a beginner this can be really hard to throw into a cylinder so the only real fix for this is to color in and as you collar in it's important that you press down on the top of it as you collar in it if not when you start pulling up this part here will start to become a wall and will be really thin so I'm going to make sure it's nice and that I'm going to color in and press it down as I do it and then I would tunnel Center it like we did before so those are some of the major issues that you have when you're a beginner trying to throw and now when the terms of this opening up you'd be able to just pull them all we'll talk about the whole mall pulling issues in the next video

Channel: Timsee clay

Views: 178,968

Rating: 4.927074 out of 5

Keywords: tim, see, timseeclay, pottery, wheel, throwing, centering, ceramics, clay, lesson, timseepots, help

Id: xupn8MRTF-8

Length: 5min 29sec (329 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 30 2011