How to Pull, Raise, and Thin Clay on the Potter's Wheel

all right the third stage and bringing up a pot is once you have centered it you've dropped the middle you've compressed the wall the third stage is compressing the clay between your fingers of your hands as you gently pull up this compression is what's going to make the wall it's thinner and taller now up until this point my left hand has always been on the left hand side this is where my hands do a big switch the left now becomes the interior hand the right is the exterior hand if the wall were not there I would be pressing my fingers together like so okay the big difference is I'm not pressing it against my palm if you press it against your palm you really don't have a very specific pressure point and it's way harder to control if you like to use the sponge in one of your hands I usually if I use it I do it on the right hand side you can do it without it though - all right so what I'm going to do is I lock my hands together and whatever way is comfortable for you my elbows must be locked to my legs or to my side my hands are locked I squeeze my fingers toward one another as I raise my hands see my fingertips would have been touching add the clean up in there all right so that was one cool and you can see that it started to go a little bit thinner and a little bit lighter now one thing to remember about as you are pulling up a wall the wall is always thicker at the base and slightly thinner at the top not until the very end does it get all the way even if you have a really thick rim and it's thin underneath there it's going to fall apart on you I'm gonna add some speed back to my kneel again we're going to do this again hands locked together fingertips across from each other as I pull up you can see that a few little chunks of clay came off on my sponge that's pretty normal I'm just going to soak up any bubble a puddle sorry puddle bits in the bottom and a little bit more water again because I don't have water wherever my fingertips are going to be here we go little rim ring of clay came off it I'm going to do that again fingertip to fingertip and pull now all I want to do for this particular piece is I want to show you all how to make a straight cylinder most items that I throw are made from a straight cylinder plates I don't do it that way you'll see that a little bit on a different different video now one thing that I did just do here was I kind of did the duckbill that I did earlier but just with the rim I'm compressing the rim you never want a really thin rim where it will be fragile alright I'm gonna try this again now what I'm going to do you can see that my hand couldn't touch right at the beginning but now can finally touch sometimes when it gets a little bit taller you have to move your hand positioning and they might not be able to touch the whole whole time so this by the way I don't know if I said at the beginning but this was a 2 pound piece of clay I believe and I'm just pulling this into just a cylinder I have a slight air bubble in the bottom of this wall that's why it's got that little bit of a bump there I had a bunch of recycled clay just scratch that I had used and apparently I was not diligent enough to get that air bubble out all the way so we're going to do that again now all I'm just trying to do is get a nice even thickness wool as I bring this up now where it flares out right down here at the bottom this is something as a beginner it's hard to get rid of but that should be a goal you want to attempt to get to the point where you don't have that thick area because more clay you'll leave on there that means the more you trim off and more trimmings you had the recycle in this beside the painting to recycle it for me so I try to get off as much clay as I possibly can at the time of throwing just resetting that rim and that's looking pretty good I will take I would knife I'll show you how I would show my students had it just clean off that edge right there if it was flaring out just a little bit you can easily trim that away okay we probably expand my views likely here on my camera there we go hopefully you can see the top of that now if you weren't able to see you a minute ago okay and I'm going to do one more cool now since almost everything is made from a cylinder you know you can think about how this could transform into a picture a cup a crock it could be really so many different things

Channel: KaransPotsAndGlass

Views: 95,068

Keywords: Centering, Pulling, thinning, compressing, compression, compress, thin, pull, center, How-to (Website Category), Clay (Visual Art Medium), Potter, Throwing, Throw, Potter's Wheel, Wheel Throwing, pots, ceramic, stoneware, cylinder, forming, Etsy, KaransPotsAndGlass, High School, Teacher, Students, Class, Classes, William Mason High School (School), Mason (City/Town/Village), Lebanon (City/Town/Village), Studio, Home, School, How-To, INstructional, tutorial, Karan, Witham-Walsh, Ohio (US State), raise

Id: ZW6-s9M_IQo

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 30 2014