Practical Trimming Tips and Design Advice for Unified Wheel Thrown Forms | PAUL DONNELLY

whether hard stage can flip them over and trim them okay so I'm gonna start just by putting this upside down and there's several different ways people use to Center or recenter pot after that's been thrown and they're moving on to the the trimming stage can use a pin tool right here just to sort of hold along the side and as it you know strikes the pin tool it's obviously closer to that side or you can you know do it to the you know some people do it on top and they'll look and see which side is wider and which side is more narrow so I mean really my goal here is just to Center the bottom bottom third of the form really and you know it's never perfectly or truly centered so you just want to try to find some sort of happy medium often times and I try to Center the top and you know the bottoms off and vice versa and I'm just going to take some clay here I'm going to hold the pot down and push this along the side now and I have a tendency to put clay around the whole bottom and then just sort of a fix it to the wheel hub but running my finger but you can just use a couple wads people for different things so when I trim I start off with the smallest tool possible a loop tool and what this does is it just cuts through the material real quick I like trimming with a very very very high wheel speed and really what I'll do is I'll just get my hands on the pot and you know really choke up on my tools almost as if you know I'm holding them right at the end and you know two hands so I have my hand on the top and then my hand in the side night and I touch them together and I'll start right at the foot the reason why I use a smaller tool to begin with is because it just sort of cuts through all of the unevenness of the pot if I use something that is wider such as this tool here it'll tend to sort of just move back and forth and sort of follow the inconsistencies and really I'm just moving very very very very slow up and down the form when I'm trimming the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm gonna figure out the diameter of the foot that I want you know and really a lot of this comes through exploring and trying different things and playing with the relationship of the proportion of the foot and with the rim so in order to figure out the diameter I mean I have to lean over and kind of look at the profile of this pot and get an idea of the rim I like using about a hat leaving about a half inch from the interior of the foot to the bottom of the pot and what that does is it allows me to play with the height of the foot and so I can always take the foot down or take a little bit off it seems too tall but I can't add clay so I like leaving that extra clay down in the bottom of the of the pot so once I've decided the diameter of the foot then I can come and figure out the height and I'll just take the same tool and come down and then into the form into the bottom of the form and I can switch tools now I can kind of move to a bigger tool and even a larger one and the nice thing about this larger tool is that it'll it'll allow you to make big sweeping angles and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to I'm going to basically trim this here so it has just a little bit of an undercut that's just an aesthetic purpose sometimes it also acts to help stop the flow of glaze now I can go into the interior of the foot and I'm just gonna start right here I'm gonna leave it a little thicker than I I need to in case you know this this jabs or cuts and so what's really subtle is you know this is a lot like centering where my tools are moving back and forth on my hand like this well I'm trimming and I'm just you know applying pressure on and off so I'm actually sweeping the trim tool from side to side going from the X here into the interior and back out and I'm gonna angle my foot so and I'm gonna come back with my rib and I'm going to trim and [Music] shape and form and so this is taking just a little bit of clay off here and it's giving me just a really beautiful sort of contour in the interior the the cup and again you know you have all these different sizes here so you can get you know different angles which you know it's harder to get that with a trimming tool that that's sort of exact curve and I can come into the bottom here and just sort of trim out a notch like that and just adds a little extra dimension on the on the bottom part of the cup so in thinking about design you know what I what I really look for is sort of similarities throughout the object so another in other words where I have a kind of a rounded foot in here it matches sort of the round interior in here there's attributes that sort of match up on the form and that's what can kind of you know that's what will bring unity to the piece so the final thing that I'm going to do I'm not gonna I'm not gonna use a lot of Clem just gonna get a little bit of water on the wheel head and just kind of wet this down and move this and as you can see this is like a little bit wobbly here so we're just gonna try to find a happy medium and I'm just gonna trim the exterior of the form real quick just to kind of give it a little bit more just a little more proportion I'm gonna trim a thick rim into it so probably the thing to do is to break this up into thirds I'm just gonna score a line on here with my pinky so you know if I break this top part into thirds as I was talking about earlier I'm a trimming tool just very gently come in and down to the bottom you can just be very subtle and that little water that's on there is just enough to keep it adhered that we are not going superfast in the same way that and I was when I was trimming the foot just very gentle so you know what we end up with is a piece that is very curvaceous on the interior you have a double volume but then on the exterior you have something that's very angular and you know that that's like one of the really beautiful things about throwing that you can have that one of the one of the neat things about when I was in China is that you know there they just rough the form out they throw everything really thick and wobbly and then they come back and they trim all of the detail into the pot and they actually make the shape of the pot just by trimming solely so it's a kind of playing with that idea a little bit so I'm just going to take this sponge and take most of the blemishes out and sort of smooth things down so we can come back and decorate the object and then put a handle on it

Channel: Ceramic Arts Network

Views: 38,253

Rating: 4.9037199 out of 5

Keywords: CAN Videos, CAN Presents, Ceramic Arts Network, Ceramics, Throwing and Trimming, Paul Donnelly

Id: 2qWnq1xeAm4

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017