More on Centering

due to battery lessons with Tim well okay so today we're gonna go over centering in greater detail last video was the beginning pottery class video but as they progress it needs to go up in detail so same thing I've got the balls made I'll start with a damp center here difference of what this video from last cuz I'm gonna go over where my hands are better how to get the clay to move and really why we sent her at all so all the same thing I'm not gonna go over all the stuff that we already did but here's this stuff starts to get different so pushing down I want to get my hands so that I'm pushing at this part here down and towards the middle I don't want to push just down I don't want to just push sideways I want that skirt to form so that it makes a good ramp I'm going to smooth it out with my finger I don't want to check it is there any gap if there is a gap or something I'm gonna do that a little bit more until it's completely sealed coning up coming up I want to make sure that this part of my hand is pushing against the wheel head enough that clay doesn't squirt out the side just plate clay squirts out the side means I'm up off the bat a little bit and it's allowing clay as they displace it to go someplace else this will often make a ramp and that ramp will start you with a spiral when you go up I'm also going to make sure that my hands do not come off the wheel head if they come off the wheel head as I move up I'm gonna put a spiral in the claim we don't want a spiral kind of defeats what we're doing I won't be able to show that in a cutaway when we do one of the next parts here but it's its initiative it happens to be an issue so senator clay the middle my wrist to my elbow need to be in a straight line that's when I push on it I'm pushing with the end of my arm as soon as I start to engage my hand wrestling it like your arm wrestling and that uses a lot more muscles than just pushing with the end of your arm if you're pushing directly towards the center then you're not glancing off the side of it you're pushing right into the middle of the clay it's efficient it's more efficient use of your the pressure that you're putting on my left hand is going to be at a 90 degree to my right if your wrists are together you're pushing away from you you're pushing away from your net forces in one direction and that one direction if a net force is more likely to cause your ball to slide off and it's less efficient in terms of moving the clay so I'm going to move my left hand out to a ninety degree so that my net force is kind of that way towards two o'clock it also decreases it from I can't do the math you parts of it but rather than pushing straight across it's now kind of balanced against each other more so than if you were pushing in one direction when I push down and squeeze together I want to make sure my hands are over left when I push I want the clay to squirt out of the top our goal is not to Center it yet it is only to get it combed up I'm gonna scrape down some against the veal head I'm gonna anchor my right hand against the wheel and you'll actually see my hand cleaning the wheel this is why I say try not to use groggy clay at the beginning because this is gonna eventually wear away your hand especially if all you're doing is centering then I'm gonna push down and forward and slowly let my left hand push the clay into my right and then let go slowly now I did that with the wheel going rather slow I often will have the wheel going just about as fast as the wheel can go so that this all looks much smoother when I do it you notice that didn't add water to that either it doesn't have to be slippery enough to slide when we're actually centering it can be a little stickier and that stickiness actually will increase your ability to Center more homogeneously and we'll do an example of that with the next balls that we do so maybe making sure my wrist is bent Center the clay elbows in a straight line I'm gonna push this way so towards like two and ten almost the clean scored out of the top of my hand let go of that pressure slowly and that's the next step it's how quickly you release the pressure to the clay if you're pushing on it and you let go fast you're gonna end up leaving it with one hand you're gonna end up leaving it bent if you let go slowly that Bend comes away incrementally and you get left with a lot less of it the faster the wheels going the quicker you can let go of the clay so that would be our goal that is centered one of the ways you can check centered especially in the beginning but you'll I know it's hard you can't eyeball it or feel it as well I'm gonna put my finger actually let's do something let's do something sharp and pointy I'm gonna run my tool until it touches how deep that tool goes in you can see it here a little deeper here and a little less deep there that is if we had to look at just its space in terms of relationship of the wheel it's a 64th of an inch off which is perfectly fine but that's just how it is on the outside that doesn't account for what goes on on the inside we could take a tool and scrub all the clay that's not in the middle off we could trim it almost in the middle that doesn't mean it's centered centered is more than just being in the middle but you can go didn't do this all the way through to make sure your Center this one I'm going to cut off we're gonna do the next demo the next one I'm gonna put a ball of white clay scrape something off here and I'm gonna put a dent in it on one side that dent I'm gonna fill with another clay I'm just gonna stick it in that dent so when I pull up and do all the stuff to this piece of clay this will start to move the more it moves the more homogenous your clay is gonna be it's a fun experiment to do at home so I've got it stuck and we can see just getting it stuck it's spun around one whole time from top to bottom that outside of the clay has twisted a whole time our goal in centering is to move the clay throughout itself there's two different ways of doing this the squishing together pushing it up and then pushing it down let it go in does it does work it's harder though to get it to move all the way through then if you push and you kind of slide off the side so I'm gonna do both and we'll compare the center dienes so I'm gonna push down squeeze up let go slowly I'm gonna wet this one to come down and forward koan up come down and forward so right now that feels in the middle like it's physically in the center of the clay but I can still feel lumpiness in the middle partly because I stuck two different pieces of clay together I let go slowly so cut it in half we get an idea of how that clay moves you can see what I did three or four passes up and down and hasn't quite and gotten to the middle yet and you can see these lines are going just straight and they're just on the outside still but they're not rotating we're gonna do it again same kind of deal take our ball of clay make a dent here take another piece of clay and this is why you know there are different ways of centering and you know if our only goal was to get the clay into the middle all the different kinds of centering would work but it's more than just getting it in the middle it's about homogenizing it and making this something that you can work with in a way that the clay will respond the best if there's inconsistencies it's not gonna respond as well as if it's nice and even horizontally okay so we got it stuck you see it's a bud stuck it a little bit longer it's up one and a half spins but the difference now is that I really won't use that much water from now on I'm gonna cone up I'm gonna come down and as I come down I'm gonna slide off the side a little bit and as I slide off the side it's gonna squish the clay back up again not gonna grab water and you let that friction build up and twist my clay and then twisting is gonna allow this clay to work itself into the wall more and through and it cut so many times that was but we're gonna do it a couple more just for shits and giggles so I'm squeezing sliding that down sliding off you actually see it started to turn white meaning that clay has now worked itself through I'm gonna go back down to the centered position we're gonna cut it this one you can see it started to spin and that spin has worked its way all the way through closer to the middle but also it's mixing this stuff in this direction if we were to cut it from the top you can see how close it is getting when it's near the bottom even to being mixed up all the way through do that to this one okay this is where the big the big difference is is the density of spin so you can see how much more it's spun and it's actually fades out here whereas we've only got one two three four there we've got one two three four five eleven twelve thirteen there's thirteen that I can count versus five on that side and it's that homogeneous it's the horizontal homogenize ation that makes it easier to throw and like if we were to wedge the clay and do this we don't get that kind of homogeneous Asian come on is that even a word it's close enough to word and that's that's the difference so do this do this test test that out how close you're getting to to being in the being in the middle and having your piece mixed up okay thanks for watching if you guys haven't already hit the like button slam that like button if you're watching for the first time or you haven't subscribed yet hit that subscribe button and thank you very much we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Timsee clay

Views: 70,308

Rating: 4.9588919 out of 5

Keywords: Pottery, centering, center, wheel throwing, throwing, clay, ceramics, timseeclay, #claybuddies

Id: oWrijMgUY-8

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2018