How to throw a cylinder on the potters wheel

all right so you've hopefully watched the video on how to scepter so I'm not going to talk too much about centering but we're going to make a cylinder so this is going to show you how to make a flat bottom make a hole make a flat bottom on the inside of your pot and then pull up the balls and then once my balls clay is centered I need to make a hole so to make a hole I'm going to cut my hands around the clay and push both thumbs straight down into that Center bit it'll start to feel a little sticky so get a little more water and keep pushing your thumbs down but you want to make sure that you don't make a hole all the way through the bottom you don't want to hit the metal because then you won't have a bottom in your pot it's just going to be a hole all the way through so to check how deep you've made your hole you're going to push your needle tool straight all the way down until it touches the metal put your finger on the inside of the hole and then with your fingers wrap them around the needle tool so that you will have a little bit of needles sticking out past your finger this is how how fat the bottom of your pot is this is a good amount I still have it's about the width of my finger actually so that's pretty good this is going to allow me room to trim we'll talk about trimming later or in a future video but it's going to make this skinnier so I need room that when I cut off the pot off the wheel it's going to take away a little bit when I trim it's going to take away a little bit so this is going to leave me with a good amount if I have if I put my needle in there and I took it out and there was this much I would probably want to make my hole deeper if I shook pushed it in there and I pulled it out and there's only a teeny tiny little bit like that this is not going to be enough you're probably going to cut a hole through it if you were just starting and you made the hole too deep I would keep going just for practice on all the other steps but if you were pretty good at making pots and you made the hole too deep you probably would want to just take it off and start again so the depth of my hole is pretty good and now I want to make a floor in my pot because we're making a cylinder that means it's going to have a flat bottom so I'm going to start by making sure there's water on the pot and in the hole so it's nice and slippery what I'm going to do is brace with one hand and with the other hand I'm going to put a finger or two inside the hole and pull straight towards my hand so I want it to be parallel to the wheel head so you know it would be the same distance from the wheel head all the way across so I'll put my fingers in the hole push my hand against the clay and I'm basically curling my fingers towards my hand and you'll be able to see the pots start to expand so you can see inside now there's a flat bottom it's a little bit Wiggly I might want to go in and even some stuff out I have a little bit of marks for my fingernails I can take my sponge and just push it in there and it will help even it out it'll help compress the book the clay at the bottom which will make your pot actually stronger less likely to crack and it will remove all my little finger nail marks that are in there so once I have a flat bottom I basically I have a pretty basic pot it's got really thick walls right now so we definitely want to thin these out they need to be you know maybe 1/3 to 1/4 the size they are right now so what we're going to do is learn how to pull up the walls when you pull up the walls you're not actually pulling you're squeezing it's a lot like making a pinch pot if this were a pinch pot I pinch and turn and pinch and turn and pinch and turn basically we have the wheels spinning for us and we're going to be pinching with one hand on the inside one hand on the outside so when the wheel is spinning we always have it spinning counterclockwise that means if I have my hands over here on the right side of the clay I'm only going to be looking at this one part the clay is spinning so that I'm really looking at all the parts every second or so I want my hands on this side because my fingertips kind of naturally point forward and this way the clay is spinning this way away from my fingertips if I were to have my hands over here the clay is spinning towards my fingertips which means if I really start squeezing hard I might get my fingers jammed up and that's when you're going to rip huge chunks of clay off so you want to work on the right side of the clay over here in line with the right side seam make a claw with your hands it seems a little silly to make a claw with your hands but if you link your thumbs and curl your fingertips your fingertips are really strong they're going to be able to find each other easily very easily through the walls of the clay and by having your fingers bent into a claw your fingertips have more strength than if they're flat if they're flat the pressure gets evenly distributed which we actually don't want we want to have a really concentrated spot where we're squeezing so make sure everything's still slippery and make your claw left hand goes on the inside right hand goes on the outside and you're going to squeeze your claw together now when you feel one area get thinner move it up feel an area get thinner move it up and keep going until you get to the top and then gently let go with the pressure I don't want to keep squeezing right over this or I'll I'll mess up that top edge so that's one pull that looks like you pull the walls up but really you're squeezing and the clay has to go up so after each pull you want to set your rim so you can see that it's a little uneven here this parts a little bit taller than this part and there's a little bit of goopy clay called slip kind of in the middle we want to fix that so I'm going to hold on to the clay right here and push down until I even it all out so to get all the slip off it will even out that unevenness in the lip and it just makes it stronger and then I want to do another poll so again I got the inside and outside wet it's nice and slippery I have my claw hand left hand on the inside right hand on the outside and I'm squeezing and if it starts to get a little dry like it's getting a little sticky on the outside so I'm going to stop it's okay that I'm in the middle of a pulp I can add water and then rather than start from the bottom again I'll go right where I left off I can feel the little divot where my fingers were and I'll just keep going from there and I get to the top and you gently let go and set my room squeezing with this hand and pushing down with this one your finger could be like this or like this but you're squeezing and pushing right beside each other I wouldn't want to squeeze here and push down over here because that wouldn't really do much so right beside each other so the top of my pot is getting close to thin enough the bottom still has some thickness down there so I'm going to go ahead and pull again sometimes with this outer bottom edge makes like a little skirt like it just kind of comes down into the clay it's okay to push in this can be really helpful to push in and make a little divot so that you're outside fingers can catch in this little space that I just made so push my fingers in and start pulling up the clay that's at the bottom and then gently let go when I get to the top set my room and from here my walls are thin enough so I'm going to Bunge out the extra water that's inside there's a little puddle in there that will start to dissolve my pots so that would not be good so i sponged out the extra water and i could be finished with this pot and take it off the wheel and trim it later or i can shape it so right now it's a pretty straightforward cylinder it's just round with straight walls or more or less straight walls but if I wanted it to kind of be a little bit fatter it I can put my fingers on the inside and push out so get the walls too slippery and you can do it this way you could do it this way it doesn't matter which hand whichever you prefer I'm going to put my right hand on the inside and I'm going to look out here you see what shape of making so I'm pushing you can see that the wall is getting a little fatter right there pushing out and I'm doing it very gradually pushing out pushing out I'll go back to the bottom push out a little more push out a little more and I think that's a as much as I want to push out but this is something you can experiment with and try all different forms and you could again stop here or if I wanted to push this in a little bit it's called colouring in when you push in get the area that you want to push in wet and then I like to make else with my hand so you know an L in backwards L and my nook with the other knuckles curl in so I end up with six points where I'm touching the clay so like this so both pointer fingers both knuckles both thumbs so that makes six points and I'm just going to very gently push in but it's very gently and then I'll slide my hands up slide my hands and you can see that the whole thing got a little bit skinnier and I can go back down squeeze in squeeze in and I could keep squeezing in it takes a little more practice to collar and then it does just push the walls out and then just do any final little adjustments on the form that you want to make pay attention to the lip of your pot you know usually when you set the rim it starts to get really square you might just gently come in with your fingers and round it out a little bit or you could take your sponge and kind of hold you hold your sponge on either side of the rim like that so you're kind of wrapping it around and that can smooth out your the lip of your pot a little bit but really pay attention to that make it look finished and then the reason I had to get this clay knife is even though we're going to trim this later you can probably see that there's still a little bit of extra clay down here I can start cutting that away so I'm going to just push the tip of the knife into the bottom of the clay you can see that it's starting to make a line and I'm pushing in and I'm pushing down at the same time now it's scraping on the bottom of the wheel and you can see some clay came off behind it and there's also a little collar of clay right here so I can just kind of cut it and start scraping it off and this is going to save you a little bit of trimming later this just makes your life a little bit easier it's very hard to get that last little bit of clay up into the walls so now I have that off and I'll make sure that I finished sponging out the inside it looks like I dripped a little more water in there so sponge out the inside again if your walls are too skinny like if this opening is too small to get this sponge in there we have a sponge on that you can that's skinny and you can stick down in there if your hands or this sponge won't fit in there so now I want to take this off so there are a lot of ways to take this off but I like this method where you add a little bit of water all the way around it makes a puddle around it and then you're going to take your cutoff wire wrap it around your hands until you have just about the width of your pot in between your thumbs you want to pull it tight and push down with your thumbs and I could start over here and pull it towards me but that usually splashes clay onto my clothes so I like to do it away from me so I'll start on this side push straight underneath my pot you can see it release to the first time sometimes you have to go through it twice and then I am going to put aside my wire now will skate around on this little bit of water so I can easily bring it to the edge slide my fingers underneath and now I'm ready to set it on my bat you really want to try not to touch it all over because it's going to leave lots of fingerprints that you're going to have to clean up later so you really don't want to touch it all over here you're just going to bring it over set it on your bat and you're finished aside from clean up

Channel: Christine Caswell

Views: 386,311

Rating: 4.8819342 out of 5

Keywords: wheel thowing, throwing on the potters wheel, cylinders on the wheel, high school pottery lessons, pottery lessons, beginner wheel throwing, beginner pottery, how to throw pots, learn to make pottery, troubleshooting on the wheel

Id: I8OKU1hdTz8

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 23 2015