How to CENTER - LARGE pieces of clay!

what is up guys i'm john the potter welcome to the studio so good to have you in here today i have a super exciting video for you guys so probably almost two years ago now i made one of the videos that is most important if you're learning pottery and that's how to center so i did five keys to centering clay and so i'll put that in the link up here if you want to go watch it but it's been viewed like over a hundred thousand times and i get messages from people like that video really helped them center so i thought it's time to do an updated how to center but with a little bit of a twist i want to do how to center large pieces of clay because if you're starting out you know i throw a ton of one to two pound like up and down and up and down and it's you don't need a lot of strength and it's much easier to center smaller pieces of clay than it is like a large five pound seven pound eight pound piece of clay so i thought it'd be helpful if i got on the wheel and showed you guys what i'm thinking about when i'm centering like a large piece of clay so you guys can throw all those giant bowls or giant vases or just get into throwing bigger stuff because it's super fun to get to that stuff so before we get on the wheel i just wanted to mention a few things we have a bunch of restocks coming up we're gonna do one a month that's when we sell pots and you guys can buy them and we super appreciate it it keeps the business going and supporting my family that's one of the main sources of our income nowadays so september october november december we have this list of the restocks coming up so if you guys want to buy any pots we'll have like at least 100 pots going up for each of those we're going totally eco-friendly on jtp so that means solar solar panels to fire our electric kilns and eco-friendly packaging we have a bunch of videos coming out on that coming up soon which is super exciting and we wrote a book so if you're a beginner potter uh we have a book coming out on october 20th called practical pottery so there's a link in the description and we'll be talking a lot about all that stuff in the future right now we want to get into five steps to centering giant pieces of clay you guys ready for it all right let's do it all right so we got block of 25 pounds of clay right here so step one is to wedge so you get your ball of clay and it's super super super important to wedge it up really really well the bigger the piece of clay i'd say the more important it is that you get it really well wedged like when i take a pound of clay off the block and throw it on to throw a mug i never really wedge it but anytime i throw two three four plus pounds of clay i always wedge because i find that the more i wedge the easier it is to get it centered and then the subsequent process of throwing it is also easier so we gotta wedge this guy up so we're gonna cut that block off that's maybe about a third so this will be that's like eight pounds right there and we're gonna wedge it and it's always like this clay has probably been sitting there for a little while so getting it started can be a little tough but i always like to wedge in one direction for a little while i'm just compressing that clay into itself and then turn it kind of start going into a different area there's a lot of different styles of wedging this is just the one that's always that i've always done so i probably wedged this up now for five six minutes uh probably 50 times or ish i don't know a lot of people ask like how many times you wedge i don't really count but you know it's it's a good a good bit so that's step one wedge wedge wedge step two is to make this into a ball super important that this gets into a ball if you a couple reasons you want it to be in a really nice shape ball when you throw it down you want the clay to be able to spread out and then cover that bottom evenly so there's no air bubbles so it doesn't trap like right now like this little see that little spot right there and if i throw it on the bat on the wheel then that's gonna trap a little air underneath there and it'll just be annoying later sometimes it's fine sometimes it'll cause problems all right so now now we're gonna get on the wheel ready we're going to get it a little bit wet you want it just kind of damp you don't want it too wet because it'll the clay will slide around on there uh but you have to have it a little bit wet or else it won't stick to that dry bat so i like to get it wet and then make sure it's like pretty dry like no sitting water step three is to throw it down as close to the center as possible if you get this giant piece of clay and you like throw it over here it's gonna be really difficult to get it back in the center after that so we want to make sure we start as close to center as possible okay ready see that even wasn't that close to center dang it john but we'll try it anyway dang that was not that close to the center you can i should probably just not even throw it down just kind of like set it down and but we'll try it anyway okay that'll be all right next thing you want to do is make sure that you have plenty of water and that you're using the water because you see how my hands just slide nice nice and easy once you get it hard it's going to be really difficult to center so you got to make sure i gotta make sure you use plenty of water small pieces of clay you can center like in one like kind of motion right you're just centering down with larger pieces of clay like this oops i got a little hair in there i probably should have put my hair up you kind of have to start at the bottom and then squeeze it up and the bottom may not get centered until like one of the last i'm just taking a little of that excess off from my terrible throwdown which wasn't in the center right so the bottom you can see isn't really centered but we're going to bring it up and then center the top so right now that center piece is really centered but down here still not centered so we'll go down to the base again bring it up so you're also coning up and conning down kind of like you do when you center clay then you can bring it back down try and keeping it right in the center and you can see i got a little excess clay there on the base that i don't i'm not gonna get that centered so i might as well just get it out of there which that's not really shouldn't have that but anyway so then i'm gonna do it again start from the base bring it up then i take that right hand bring it down a little bit and every time i do that it feels like it gets a little bit closer to center the whole piece if you need help you know certainly this is more of an advanced you want to start centering other pieces of clay smaller pieces of clay but i can feel that i'm pretty close to the center on the outside you just kind of play with from the top you know using that right hand on the top using that left hand around the outside and that's basically it and then step five would be to start with the piece in a reflection of what you want to make so if you're gonna make a big wide platter then you're gonna start with your clay more flat right so you're going to flatten it it's going to be a shallower base wider base but if you're going to make like a big tall vase or something like that then you can keep it a little bit more like it is right now where we go down in the middle and then we go up so i think i'm just gonna make a a little bowl not a little bowl it's gonna be a big bowl [Music] [Music] seven pound bowl not too bad feels pretty good you can kind of feel sometimes like if you left a lot of weight and so then we'll wait a couple hours actually probably like tomorrow that we'll be able to come back and trim this bowl and then we'll be able to get the foot looking just how we want it and any extra clay weight out of there i hope this video helped you guys think about centering larger pieces of clay and once again with everything in clay uh you just gotta do it and the first time you do it you're probably going to be pretty terrible at it but maybe the 50th time that you do it you'll be like this isn't so bad i can do that so you know if you've only ever thrown one or two pounds maybe try throwing three pounds maybe try throwing four five if you have any comments questions concerns let me know in the comments as always i super appreciate all you guys and uh checking out the videos we're gonna try and be making way more videos i took kind of a break from both making and videos but now we are gonna get back into it so as always let me know if you want to see any videos subscribe like share comment all the things we'll see you guys in the next video [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jonthepotter

Views: 26,349

Rating: 4.9525423 out of 5

Keywords: Pottery, Ceramics, Clay, Studio, How to throw pots, how to be a potter, Ceramic Arts, Pottery Studio, How to center clay, handmade, functional pottery, functional ceramics, Jonthepotter, making things out of clay, pottery making, kiln unloading

Id: 9mAwgXJEsTQ

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020