Soft Slab Construction with Scott Jennings

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] I'm Scott Jennings Furio hey Barbara I'm going to demonstrate some of the techniques I used to make my hand-built functional wear earlier session I was able to get three pieces out and I think I should be able to get about the same I worked pretty quickly mostly with wet slabs and work to start to finish until I'm done it's a group of pieces over here that you can come and look at I'll pass a few around snow these are also for sale if you want to get a piece I'm gonna make a cup like this a bowl and I think I'll do this little vase here as well okay so all of these are done completely by hand without using molds or anything you know I start off with some sort of cylindrical form dictated by a pattern but I start with so say like the vase over here this is the pattern for the vase it gets two of each of these to become a round volume and I make it manipulate it quite a bit once it's upright into the forum I'll just get into it and start talking as I'm doing things we'll start with the cup and please like if you have any questions you know I can't ask them as they come up yeah just move forward here so I use I work at Cohn five everything's fired an electric kiln this is cone 5b mix I've been using the same clay for 20-something years I just find it to be super super forgiving and easy to work with it has no grog in it gives me a lot of like the feeling of porcelain without being porcelain right pretty easy to work with we start out always just kind of squash out the clay to get it loosened up so it moves around a little bit B mix yeah yeah yeah definitely yeah I mean you could work I could do the same stuff with porcelain but for what I'm trying to get like visually it's like it looks like porcelain or now if like porcelain that I'm happy with the results so to roll-out slabs they use a pillowcase a couple of sticks to regulate the thickness of the slab and a substantial rolling pin so I'll do is I'll start from the middle go to the outside and then flip it over you can't muscle it all out in one shot you have to do it slowly hey how's it going it's a long time how you doing Sophie likes tea and familiar faces around here so I'm going to continue to do this roll it a little bit and then flip it over and the reason I'm flipping it over is because as you push down with the rolling pin the clay sticks to whatever surface you're rolling on and it's at a certain point it's not going to move anymore so if you don't flip it you're going to end up with like thick and thin spots where you're trying to get something that's uniform so give it a couple no I heard people some people do that I've never found the need for it yeah it's like one of those rules right lots of clay rules that kind of throw away most of the time I made Brit I may break a few rules while we're doing this today so I just roll out until it bottoms out in the sticks then I know that I have a uniform uniform slab to work with one more pass [Music] okay so I know that's that's gonna be the same thickness throughout because it stopped moving I'm not going to go any further eighth of an inch eighth on inch or I think there were probably three sixteenths but after using it for a while they flatten out a little bit so about an eighth of an inch you could do this yeah you could do the same same kind of stuff like hand building with no I mean the thickness kind of depends on how comfortable you feel working with the clay right a good starting place is quarter of an inch because it clay behaves a lot better as soon as you start getting thinner it starts getting a little more floppy and you have to develop some dexterity to be able to handle it effectively so you know I started hand building after I was out of college I was living in San Francisco I didn't have any space to work out other than my kitchen table but I had access to a kiln cuz I worked at this patron pottery place like was the kiln jockey glaze and stuff put him in the kiln glaze and stuff put him in the kiln pull him back out my wife and I were ready to get married and she said hey why don't you make cups for everybody and that's kind of what started it all so I had to make you know wait and find it like a hundred people and I need to make you know 150 cups and you know looking back I mean this is like an earlier cup it's kind of like the stuff I was making back then and this is kind of what they've evolved into so they've changed quite a quite a bit of at a very glacial pace it's a little by little by little but doing that was one of the best things I ever did because it I realized what working was about right it's like you go to college you learn all these like things about like you know philosophy and some design stuff but you don't really get into the work you come out with not much skill and it's really just this is all it's just a matter of doing doing this over and over and over again that there was a really strong lesson that I learned from doing that and then I've been consistently working ever since then but what I started doing too was like coming up with different patterns you know it's like for everything I'll make like say for a cup you know this is gonna be the pattern that we'll use to make this cup right very simple it's got some markings on it I usually put notes like if anything comes up as I'm making something I'll write the note on the pattern so I can not make the same mistake again it's another one I may do a little drawing or the piece that I'm making I'll make marks for the handles a lot of times I date the patterns every now and again just like if I'm doing the same thing over and over again but usually isn't the case but if I am I may push myself and just like throw the pattern away to make a new one right so I can keep the work fresh and evolving so cut patterns are pretty pretty straight ahead here's a pattern for a bowl right the bowl that we're gonna make it's two of these that's exactly what I do with like especially pretty much with any piece I'm doing or that you're working with a some volumetric form of some sort I do it in paper first and then use like this blue painters tape to tape it together like I'm making the piece so I can kind of work out the basic proportions you know something like this like this is gonna be like a pattern for a teapot [Applause] right but this allows me to I can put this together like tack it together with tape and then tack it together with tape until I kind of get an idea if this is going to work out or if I'm going in the right direction so there's there's some advantages and once I get a basic idea together then I'll make like a 3d sketch out of clay kind of work out like look at where it's not coming right and then make adjustments in the pattern it's kind of like this dialogue going back and forth until that thing comes out right and then what I think is right maybe right for a while and then it won't be right that's like one of the clues for me like as I'm working when something no longer looks I'll say like good like there's something I'm seeing something different like the language has changed or I've developed some new part of the language that I know it's like time to like reexamining like these cups just recently I was making cups similar to this for like years and there was something about the pattern on the surface that all sudden stopped making sense the way it did before so I tweaked that and became like this new piece and now I'm into the next phase and who knows what the next phase will be but it's like a constant dialogue and changing stuff up but yeah yeah and a little bit and you know it's like it's I don't calculate anything I just kind of like roughly guess it and it usually works out right you know with the cup it's not going to shrink that much you know 10% doesn't end up being too much the whole thing yeah yeah I don't think that much I mean but I do account for the shrinkage right this is like a the pitcher made this one this one over here in the last session but yeah there's so there's they're all cylinders or like a section of a cone for the most part but then you start tweaking it and then once it's tweaked and into that shape into a vertical shape then that's when I start going and manipulate it which we'll see in this cup that I'll start off with so this pattern just one of my favorite knives temper k34 I'm gonna cut this out and reserve a piece for the bottom let's put that guy aside one thing about hand-building two is really don't have to waste any clay ever alright like little scraps like this immediately ball up and they keep a bucket right off the side of the area where I'm working so I'll take these scraps ball them up even like little tiny scraps and then dunk them in water and then put them in that bucket and then after I collect enough then I'll budget back up and it'll be just as good as if you just got it fresh out of the bag once I have this cut out I'm gonna make some marks for the patterning on the surface so you see I've got these little marks here as guides so I know where to impress my design on the surface do this on a board instead no never use that needle tools plow through stuff this has a very narrow blade it's narrow and width and it's very thin so when you cut with it there's hardly any drag so you don't end up all with all kinds of like mess all over the place so it's excellent excellent tool it's my other favorite tool my little roller so there's a wallpaper seam roller all right so I use this to soften edges and impress a pattern on the surface so like for this cup here what I'm going to do is I'm going to take just the edge and draw with it so I'm just trying to make some fluid lines here I'm not trying to make it too regular I want some variation in the negative space between the areas where I'm gonna push out so try to account for that when I'm impressing this on the surface so right but what I'm doing it's like I'm trying to do everything for the most part like all the finishing while this piece is flat so I'm trying to get this set up so that I can just once it's upright it's ready to go don't need to mess with any more so what I'll do now is I'm gonna soften these edges here by just rolling very gently across the edge right so cuz I'm just squashing the clay out and the clay naturally wants to round out on the edge so and I'm also trying to thin it out a little bit too with hand-building really like the the less you touch the clay the better so that's kind of true with like a lot of things in ceramics right the less you spend best time you spend on the wheel the better things usually work out same thing the less time you spend picking up or fussing with things the more likely it's going to come out well so I'm going to take this little scoring tool score down the right-hand side and then across the bottom this is just a serrated rib a strip cut out of it I just taped around it so it's not too sharp but it makes a great tool and pick it up and flip it over just refine this back edge as well so it's not sharp score again down the right-hand side slip and it's ready to assemble yeah yeah I like it yeah for drawing yeah having that sharp edge is really good and just like it's small it's easy to handle like I always have one of these I had this for years and it's just it's terrible it's like it doesn't roll it's got like a flat spot on the inner inside of this axle it just it's not very friendly it's a hardware store you won't be able to find this one I don't think they make this brand anymore this one that says made in USA on it it's for wallpaper but they make another one you could probably get at Home Depot or any place that has a big green handle on it with a metal axle and a the the wheel is just a little bit bigger but it'll work pretty much the same I've got a whole bunch of those just in case this one ever dies which hopefully it won't so next thing I do is get out my this is my extra set of hands my French rolling pin I'm gonna just take this lay the clay in place and so I seams are part of my work right I just love leave them exposed but it's important that you if you're doing that they have to be clear right you don't want my kind of a messy seam so I want to like just roll it together just enough so that it makes sense so I use this little roller for this because it gives you some leverage and I can get a really good compression on that seam so see I don't want to make it look sloppy right I want to have it just look kind of even in uniform but using this roller it really allows you to get a good compression right we could slip and score but that's not going to really do the job right so if you just slip and score and put things together in my work out but I might just like come apart but if you slip and score and then you compress you get this you get like a really strong weld between those surfaces and it's not going to come apart okay so at this point I just take a second and kind of straighten things out make it as round as possible I have these little cardboard and foam disks that I use just once I've refined that that edge I don't want to undo it right if I turn that up this is really wet right it's just right out of the bag if I turned it upside down that top edge we get flat and I don't want that I want to keep it rounded off so I take my finger and just kind of flare out this bottom edge here go back and round it off again I don't use a tool I probably should you know get like a yogurt container or something it's tapered then I could go and just push it down and round it back off but I just kind of do it do it by hand so once we have that prepared then we can go ahead and prepare piece for the bottom so I like to carry texture around the piece I use a lot of these it's like drawer liners that have various textures on them this one's kind of a wider we feel to pass it around could kind of feel it passed this one around too or like this one here is like all these dots but I don't know where to get any of this so this is my only piece yes I'm not saying you can't touch it but it's like it's very precious to me [Laughter] so what I'll do is I'll just I'll bring some of this texture into the bottom by just rolling it over the surface all right so I'm just adding a little bit of texture and if you guys like look at some of these cups pass them around see they all just pass them and feeling I just feel like it's like bringing that little bit of texture onto the bottom as well as a little more excitement makes it that's another level of like the tactile quality at the bottom so I signed the piece right now before I have it up right right so this is a little chop that I made I don't know if you guys have ever made one of these but you just take a piece of like smooth clay dry it out completely and carve the reverse of whatever you want and it'll give you a raised raised signature and you can see it on the bottom of the cups there's a signature so just do just something like that throw this over here take a little slip eyes aren't quite what they used to be here used to be able to see that raised area that comes through from actually doing the stamp really easily but lately lately I can't see it too well so I'm just gonna lay down some slip here carefully take this piece check it again so that it's round and then put it in place and then I cut the bottom using this little tool that I made so it's just like it's got a knife blade on one end and the tool normally has a needle tool on the other end so I just yank that out and bent this and having it bent gives me a better perspective as I'm trying to cut but so what I'm going to do it's on this turntable here I'm gonna hold the knife in place follow around the bottom edge and just cut off you just have to report to everybody else right yeah vertically or sometimes I'll flare it out just a little bit but the main thing I want to try to keep the blade from going up into the wall sometimes I will leave some marks on there that aren't too cool but so once it's attached I'll give it just a little tiny drop to tack it in place and then come back in first usually I use one of these little blending tools to kind of reinsert the rest of the seam so it goes all the way down to the bottom clean that up and then finally I'll just again compress it no I don't I score at the bottom of this when I started of the cylinder yeah but not the other part you know really I probably don't even need to score and I have in the past not scored these at all if if you if you know I didn't score the base though no no let's this part the cylinder yeah but you know like if you're working with wet clay it's gonna stick as long as you get a good compression it'll stick together but you want to be safe do a little scoring just be sure so this is the point you know where it's like okay I've got a cylinder what am I gonna do with it next and this is where I start manipulating to make the deform kind of come alive so I start off so I'm going to be pushing out these areas what I've drawn on the surface let's start by you just manipulating the profile a little bit right so that's giving me some places to aim for attaching the handle as well and then after that I'm gonna go in and just stretch it all out I'm just use my fingers for bigger pieces or different pieces I may use a rib but for small stuff like this I'm just gonna stretch it out very gentle pressure right I'm just really trying to feel the the resistance that I'm getting from the clay and it's gonna kind of tell me like not to go too far you know so now it starts getting a little bit of life I'll do the same thing the other sections trying to create this kind of rhythm on the surface where it's in and out and up and down [Music] so you guys have questions just shout them out okay no I don't you'll see I don't use any water I think water on the surface when you're handling is just makes things impossible to touch but it's like what I'm teaching it's like I try to like like don't use any water you don't need water you just need your finger and a light touch and inevitably somebody you like uses water because that that's what you think you're supposed to do but I think developing like a very gentle touch works works better like even when I had this like flat when I was refining the edges right it's like you can easily like kind of refine these edges but just by dragging your finger across that very very gently but it takes time to kind of develop like how much of that feel like how much you need to press just kind of like when you're throwing on the wheel you know so you're throwing on the wheel you start pulling up the wall and you get to a point where it starts chattering on your finger because you know you're drying out and you can either just like let go all together or hold on for dear life and hopefully it works out but most the time just letting off a little bit of pressure is all you need to be able to keep keep moving up which that's just a piece of drywall yeah that's like my preferred work surface that's pretty inexpensive and pretty durable too but it's absorbent right so it releases anything that you put on it so I have a lot of these like plasma these boards drywall boards around my studio and I just you know cut them and cut them with a utility knife and then break them and then add some sort of tape on the edges to keep it from getting too messy they could I aligned my work table I have a door is my table and then I have pieces of this stuff lined over there yeah as long as you're not using a lot of water it's gonna be fine so you start adding a lot of water to it it'll start breaking down and you know it's just paper on the surface so it can kind of start coming apart on you so once I have that the shape put up then I'll go back in I'm gonna now I'm gonna caller right so I'm just gonna push in the areas opposite of where I pushed out yeah I think so you know when I've like worked like I've worked like tech jobs where I've had access to like stone where most like the places I teach here and whenever I get here I'm like I want to you stone right no he's BMX or anything it's different this feels a little more delicate but it is very forgiving stone where yeah I think you gotta just get in there with it and like attack it like kind of aggressively it's just like a little bit different and maybe sisty I'm a it's just the idea of the stone where where I feel like it's kind of crude and rough and I approach it differently but like this it's very delicate and I handle it gingerly okay so this is almost done we just need a handle so the way I make handles is just by flattening flattening a coil so I start off with a chunk kind of like so and just squeeze it out so it's round right your hand will make it pretty round to start then I roll a bit of a tapered coil so it's a little bit narrower again at the bottom connection point until it's pretty uniform then I'll take the roller and start flattening this out so flatten the top section first flatten the bottom just make sure it's a good thickness so I get a little too thick it may not make that curve too well and then what I also do like I'll make some marks about the rough handle lengths that I using on a particular piece so I don't have to reinvent it like every time I'm making these so I'll use those marks to kind of figure out about how long I want to make this handle then on the top connection I'm going to go ahead and cut it at a bit of a curve right so that it conforms a little bit better to the piece because we're putting it on a curved piece bottom the way I press it on the surface I don't don't worry about it just a straight cut is fine so I'm gonna just take my finger and touch all those areas that are sharp right you just touch the clay in that sharp edge will go down it'll squash out the same thing on the top it's cleaned up then generally with like a candles I always find that if you grab them from the ends they'll naturally kind of want to go into a nice curve so you know you could let that set for five minutes and then put it on but I'll just put it right on it's gonna be fine so I'm gonna relate this handle to these lines on the surface oh and I like a mess around like handle placement like this is gonna be kind of a lower handle that I like changing like sometimes it's high sometimes it's low sometimes they're really Peaks sometimes they're very round I think there's a lot of interesting interactions that come out with the form when you kind of play around with like what goes on with handles and plus I just like making handles for like everything put a handle on anything if I can you know it's like those little vases or whatever so scored the body score the handle add a little bit of slip and then I'm gonna push out from the inside as I'm pressing firmly from the outside and really jam this on do the same thing on the bottom I'm gonna go back in and make sure this is pressed on really well change the shape of the handle a little bit and usually what I do is I try to set it up a little bit higher than I want it to be in the end because that's gonna slump a little bit in the kiln all right so I set it up a little bit higher it should kind of sit back down where I want it to be and finally I'll just check it over look at things sometimes I manipulate the profile just a little bit by pushing in here there and then I'll give this one more pass here I'd like to put a bit more of a bevel on this bottom I think it creates a bit of a foot to the piece a natural place to delineate the glaze and if the handle is really wet you know I'll just let it dry like this for a little bit right like ten minutes it'll be fine I think this handles stiff enough that it's not going to go anywhere but I also may still set it on the foam because if I Belov that edge and I set this piece and it's really wet if it's not on the foam it may still like sit back down so now a lot of times I just used water water works fine you know I've never yeah what I do too is like when I have a bucket of water sitting on my work table when I'm done making and I'm getting ready to load a BIST kill and I go over all the pieces with a sponge right it's it's smooth it's smooth clay body so you could go over and clean up anything you know if it's got grog in it then you're gonna pull up all the grog to the surface and it's gonna yell rough and a total bummer so when I'm done cleaning all those pieces you know I may have like 60 to 100 pieces like going into a kiln I've accumulated a lot of slip that I've taken off the pieces and it just settles out in the bucket they pour off the water and then pour that leftover clay into my slip bucket and replenished like this is just the other day I just made this because I was I cleaned up a bunch of stuff and did abyss fire so it's pretty easy comes out really smooth right yeah I don't I've never seen the need to add anything I know some people will add like vinegar or something but I think more important to joining stuff is just getting that compression right if you don't get that good compression you don't get this you get these two pieces of clay sitting on each other so I would strive for that you know even just like water on the surface is gonna be better to get that to happen okay so what I want to do next is I want to roll out a couple of slabs because I want to do this little bottle here but it it's thin and it's very funky so I needs to sit up for a little bit so I'm gonna roll out the slabs really quick so see that again and then I'll move on to making a little bowl like this so I like using this pillowcase to roll out on it's really smooth ride it doesn't leave any texture on the surface once you rolled out your slab [Applause] so again sticks squash out the clay first loosen it up Rex is really stiff right out of the bag um I don't know yeah yeah I demonstrate that because I think most people have a problem like with the scene like they when they're making something they want the initial thing is you want to blend it in and it's pretty easy yeah you just couple kind of like a really severe angle like bevel both edges at like 30 degrees so you have a lot of surface area to come together and you assemble it but for what I'm doing it's like part of the design of the piece is the scene I like leaving that as like the clue as to how it was like made right and again coming back to like the idea is like when you're assembling the scene you need to make sure that it's clear right if it's not clear then you know if you like kind of mess up the edge then it doesn't doesn't really work in all you know having the seam exposed also allows me to resolve that transition between the surfaces if I've got texture on it right so if I have you know a cup like this that's got this really heavy texture on it that transition is very clear because it's very exposed if I tried to blend it in it'd be really challenging there's there's ways to do it but it just wouldn't quite wouldn't quite makes sense as easily as just leaving it you know really exposed yeah and so I just like carries that through you know with everything with the handle you know I don't blend in the handle I just like stick it on there really well and all of the seams - they create a nice place for the glaze to pull right so it you know rather than like try to hide it just like put it out there it's like make it like front and center right so just like that glaze pooling in there just accentuates it so I'm just kind of what's that yeah well that's you know that's the cool thing it's like with with clay it's like there's there's so many solutions you know it's like everybody's gonna do something a little bit differently and if you can kind of forget about the rules a little bit or don't subscribe to all the rules then usually things come out like well you don't need hibbett yourself right a little bit this off so again I'm this is not very exciting we're just rolling this out so I could get out of the wave and then I'll get onto the bowl but this yeah some of these taller pieces like you're gonna like the picture I was working on the last session it couldn't need to set up just a little bit right I'm working pretty thin and if it is just super wet I may try to stretch it and but just fall apart on me but I can't have it really stiff I need to have it wet enough that it will stretch needs to have that plasticity like available for me to use okay so it's pretty good so set this guy over here out of the way another one going onto a bowl Desa like i was talking earlier about you know my wife having me make all those cups for our wedding now there have been like several instances where I've had to do that like make lots of pieces and every time I've done it like something big and exciting has come out as far as like just the way I approach so I can't impress upon all of you like how important that is like just you know keep keep making right if you're making all the time whatever you're doing is gonna get better and better and better and not only that you're gonna discover stuff it's like keeping you're keeping your eyes open thinking about thinking about the things that happen that may not have been expected is not necessarily bad things right when you get that pot out of the key home that the glaze does not look how you envisioned it you know put your piece away put it away for three weeks and come back and look at it again there's a lot of times you know it's like you just you formulate this idea in your mind about how it should be and you're maybe blinded to the idea of what actually could be going on there I think that goes about for life in general right just like keeping your eyes open it's like super important with clay because another one should be it oops don't get too aggressive like that okay so we're set up for this guy little that sit for a little bit and come back to in a minute get on to something fun it's a pretty stiff now if you guys want to pass that around you can okay so that's the same thickness eighth of an inch all the way throughout so for these little bowls done them like many different ways over the years but lately I've been doing this thing we're actually add like a foot foot to the bottom so I've got a little pattern for the body and as well as the the foot piece here's a larger version kind of the same same Bowl and I do one that's even bigger than that but they're all done the same same way so I assemble into some sort of volumetric like conical shape and then manipulated quite a bit to get the the volume to come out with the piece I make some of them like that one like all the glassy glaze is like that yellow and the green there it's all the same base the green has a little bit of a like a very small amount of copper carbonate in it like 1/2 of 1% and then the yellow has a Mason stain can't remember than 64 64 is maybe the number and then over the whole thing like I discovered that if I put the matte glaze like that's on this cup like any of these cups here if I put that over then all of a sudden gets all this like interestingly visual texture going on this is like one of those things where I was like in the studio like you know I was about almost two years ago I stopped working like a regular job and started focusing on doing this like teaching teaching in the Dan hire fire which there's a class down there anybody wants to join in starts this week yeah we've got room when I got back into the studio you know I hadn't been doing it like on a regular enough basis for quite a few years I was I had like a pretty intense like kind of regular job working in ceramics but not doing anything fun and it took me a while to get back back in the saddle so to speak working was but one of the things I thought of was like oh man I need to like I wanted like fresh and stuff up make new glazes kind of change my palate and I guess the one thing one thing that I realized in recent years is that with this process like you don't need to reinvent the wheel right it's just like all I'm doing it's like I've been rehashing the same thing over and over I just keep on doing it it naturally evolves and the same thing happened like with the glazes it's like I actually just stopped and looked at what I had and said well what if I just combine these glazes and see what happens and all of a sudden opened up this whole new world of like what I could do with the surface so that's what what this is it's just those previous glazes but then I just took the matte glaze a very really thin coat and dipped it over the whole thing and all of a sudden those glazes come alive in a totally different way and a lot more interesting visual things happen on the surface yeah yeah I mean it's like it's get something with some glazes it doesn't work but with this combination worked perfect so I was like no dipped yeah I dip everything and I come up with all kinds of crazy things yeah like I'll use a lot of wax resist and really strategize how to get get it to come out you know with glazing I know that's a source of a lot of apprehension like in the clay world you know people get nervous about it and I think it's I actually enjoy it quite a bit but I think the most important thing to do is just really slow down and watch what's going on like with the glaze like watching what the drips which direction the drips are going and thinking about like what that drip that's hanging on your thumb is going to do is it gonna drop down the side of the piece or should you wipe off your thumb before you like you know that's there's lots of little little details to think about so right now I'm just going to impress this pattern into the surface for the bowl okay so this is some of the drawer liner again so you can see it just impress that surface yep yeah so you get the slab to like the thickness that you're going for and then run it through one more time and one thing I did too is I flipped it over so that the clay would still still move I'll do this one quickly without talking too much so we can get on with this we're gonna squash stuff out Oh plenty of time plenty of time sometimes I need to stop too and just check my pattern to make sure it's gonna fit we're still good I think we're good doesn't take a few minutes very good okay so I need two pieces for the sides of the bowl and then a little bit more for what's going to become two-foot this piece is a little unwieldy so I'm just going to use this pony roller here to impress it [Applause] that out of the way I'm just gonna work directly on this board for cutting it out and just step this over here so it dries out a little bit once it gets saturated then it doesn't really want to work too well to start sticking to the clay so I'll take my pattern bolts my patterns on my small foot for the bowl and just find an area that I'm happy with and go ahead and cut this out we'll reserve this piece over here cuz I'll probably use that for the foot cut the sides so for this bottom though I'm going to cut it just a little bit of a bevel that way it'll sit down a little bit better and a cleaner cleaner connection on the bottom I was just keeping my hand on the pattern to kind of keep it in place just enough there just enough there okay so just like the cup of them approaches the same I'm gonna try to deal with all the finishing while it's flat so again we get off the handy tool deal with these edges and when you're using this it's really like you're almost letting the tool do the work now you don't you'll really push on it you just move it back and forth across that surface and that's gonna be enough to really get that clay to soften up and squash out and get rid of that really harsh cut edge let's go over these edges the dry finger again the point is just getting rid of anything that's a bit sharp at all okay we'll prepare it for assembly so I'll take my scoring tool just go around this bottom here and then again down the right side carefully pick it up and I'm going to lay it out so it's ready for assembly can cover these edges really quickly I'm going around this inside edge as well this is one part of them still trying that super satisfied with how I resolve this on the inside I think it's pretty close but you know go ahead and score and stick it together use one totally yeah it's like I've demonstrated I've demonstrated the one piece one that's okay that's okay if as long I think if you're doing like a like a hidden see more that you bevel the edges and then put it together so that seems not they're all together it comes together kind of weird maybe I just haven't done it enough to really know it but but I know what you're saying yeah you could like cut this in half and put it together - yeah and that becomes part of the piece right the design so I'll just overlap overlap this about a quarter of an inch and well it's flat I'll just go ahead and attach this what's that high school high school scored both sides yeah so you know when I lift both of them I I when it was face up I scored the right side on both of them and then I flipped it over and I scored the right side again and that allows those to come face to face a little bit more slip here I'll use my rolling pin it's my extra set of hands to get this to come together and using the roller to join it gives you some more leverage so you get a really good compression and join mr. ton will go in here and kind of straighten that out make it fairly fairly round at this point like I let that sit for a minute I'm gonna go ahead and put together the foot so let's see here first thing we do is we just start cutting so I'm going to do the outer part of the foot first so use my little pattern as a guide and then cut it out so cut out the outside then I cut out the inside we're gonna use a pattern I just kind of wing it I always do the spiral because it makes it kind of easier to get the clay out does look cool right and then keeping with the idea of like refining it as much as you can well it's all flat I'm just going to press down that edge there that's kind of sharp on the inside and this is one of my favorite things to do right here just like spinning this and putting this I don't know why it's just like I just like it every time I get to do it it makes me kind of happy so so I'm just like scoring that up I'll take this one go ahead and sign it so we want to laminate these together basically but I do want to score just a little bit in between them probably be fine but sometimes I'm less Cavalier and more cautious and stay together well it's not so fun on this one this one I was all this texture and it's not I don't know it's still okay I just like this one a lot so then put a little bit of slip line it back up so it's close and then I don't want to get rid of this texture so I'm gonna try to just laminate this by pushing very kind of gently some of the texture goes away but mostly it's start of the start of the foot then we just cut out this outside but okay so that's gonna be it's gonna be our foot for our bowl so one thing I do want to do is just soften these edges a little bit and this is definitely one of the pieces where I to get this foot really refined I wait until it's like totally bone drying go over with the sponge to get rid of all those like sharp undulating edges to round it off a little bit more okay so now it needs the rest of it good so what I'm gonna do just flip this over real quick and just flare out the base just a little bit it's still very very wet and floppy get it as round as possible and then I'm going to stick it on there so I wanted to be pretty pronounced so leaving quite a bit of an overhang a lot of times I have to expand it just a little bit the placement just a little bit by running my finger around the inside no coils yeah you give it a little tiny tap get it stuck in place I always have some foam laying around I like to have this again to keep the rim from getting kind of too messed up and then I'll go back in and just make sure I'm compressing that pretty well so it's stuck on there so that should be in pretty good shape so now's when we make it into the bowl form so first thing I do is kind of activate like the profile line that I'm gonna follow so I'm just taking my finger and kind of expanding just could see this side compared to that side just trying to start that the idea of the volume that I want to create or the direction that I'm going so I'm running my finger up along the seam again kind of just drawing the surface drawing a line on the surface and then on either side I expand it just a little bit more then I'll a flare the rim just a little bit like backing it up on the outside with one hand while I'm running my finger around on the other side and then they get up my rib so with smaller smaller areas to expand like a finger is fine but this needs something a little bit bigger I could do with my fingers but I'd probably end up seeing a lot more finger marks in the process so usually what I do with these is I'll do one pass and I'll see how far it will go sometimes it just doesn't go quite right and I have to let it sit for a little bit and then I can go back and do it again it'll get to the volume that I want yeah I mean it's only get like 15 minutes or something in between passes but it's easier doing it down a little bit lower hopefully I my my to two-tier banding will be carefully start drawing this across the surface so I'm really gonna start just like looking at that line that it's creating come back in down at the bottom expand it a little bit more and do the other side and this is right after like maybe let it just be done for a little bit and then come back to it and look at it again because if you know this is pretty thin and as soon as I start stretching it it gets even thinner and it's really wet so it may not cooperate it may like fall apart on me so to be kind of patient it's just very very very light touch you know this way it working like really suits my personality well I'm very patient with some things like clay work I'm not super patient with so this feeds you know it's like immediate gratification right I could be done with a piece pretty quickly you could see like a cup you know maybe takes 15 minutes to make go in full speed same thing with this so put it up here yeah it's like flexible a little blending tool and I'd like it with the rims not quite uniform kind of tweak it a little bit kind of get some some rhythm going around the surface you know the last thing I need to do I'll come back to this one in a few minutes I think it needs just a final touch but I need to make sure it's straight because a lot of times they end up being like kind of caught off to one side in that case you know I may just take it and just hit it on one side to even it back out to get it go in the direction that needs to be are you serious but yeah well I compressed a little bit with the roller when it was upside down but yeah I don't add anything to it it's just like another seemed like it that I want to just keep pretty clean right I don't want to touch it too much it looks pretty straight so yeah we'll leave this alone for a little bit yeah mom yeah that's that's your aesthetic choice you know it's like yeah it's like it's like I guess whatever construction like it's it makes it a little more subtle but if it's not done in a clean way even putting glaze over its gonna make it look like messy I think it's just like handle as little as possible that's like my idea it could just be covered up yeah you're right okay get on to this little vase right so for this guy something like this here we've got used two of these to make the upper section and then this for the body so this is very similar to the cup right it's got the same same kind of surface treatment it gets back to the idea of like just all I'm doing is rehashing things it's like a lot of times all I'll get in the studio and start thinking about new forms and I may think of something that I did like you know five or six years ago you know maybe it's time to revisit that let me look at it and then it's like getting back to the idea of like I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time I just like I just look at something and usually just life experience and working will bring you a different perspective on what you're doing and evitable you'll go back into the studio I'm making in a different way that's been my experience it was so reserve that for the side or for the bottom carefully cut this out put this on this other board so it's not hanging off the side yes I'm going to do this in a similar fashion with the cup you know I've got this pattern with all these different marks like directional marks so I know which way to go when I'm impressing the pattern so take one of these rubber tools and I the way it works to get the rhythm I like I have marks on one side for one piece and then other marks on the other side so then they line up because the idea is that the lines should like line up all the way around so I'll start off here by just putting some marks now flip it over use the other marks unless you get everything to kind of line up pretty well they can go ahead and deal with the surface so now we get get out the roller again start drawing the design and following the clues or the cues here from the way I put those lines together like if you look at them you can see some are going up and some are going down that's just a guide for me so I know which way I should be going with this with this design so there's our pattern right and the same thing is going to happen with the cops we're gonna push some areas out and call her in some of the other areas but still want to approach this the same way where I'm dealing with these edges so I'm just going to deal with the sides as far as refining them the bottom on the top don't matter too much look over these edges here soften them up a little bit one thing I started thinking about I've been using this new black glaze that I'm trying to figure out how it works and one thing I think I want to do some of these bottles with this like very matte black glaze but I realize with the stuff coming out of the kill and that black glaze doesn't like sharp edges so like with this I may think about like using a sponge on those edges to like quiet it down soften it a little bit it tends to like nice round edges for some reason it crawls along an edge it's weird super super weird that's the nice glaze I think it's like super like super matte really shows off the form pretty well okay so see if we can get two out of here we can or come close so these are setting up just a little bit more but I can go ahead and make this little neck portion pretty easily because it's so small and will give me too many problems just just enough okay so the same thing is going to apply here we want to deal with all these edges refine all the edges before we start assembling and this is one of those shapes that doesn't really want to go together super easily so you kind of have to coax it to become the shape that you want so I'm going to score down the right-hand side score down the right-hand side we'll flip it a deal with these edges just a little bit and then score down the right-hand side on both of them again so I'm going to start doing is just assembling the upper portion so just kind of like the straight section so so just looking at this it doesn't seem like it's gonna work out I think how in the world is this going to become the top section of that right but it's just like you know clay will do interesting things I mean you just gotta kind of push it and coax it into the the shape that you want so just bend this out a little bit create a bit of a curved curved shape to it this is where it's just like a lot of handwork just kind of holding it and pushing it out where it needs where you think it needs to go so bring this around again overlap it and everything I'm doing is like super gentle alright it's like I'm just pushing very very lightly on everything so once you got it to this point then it's almost going to work more slip it's probably using the roller to do any compressing it's just all my fingers at this point so I'm trying to first get this where the angle or the direction changes from coming in to going back out get that tacked in and then slowly kind of press everything else into place all right so it's kind of going in the right direction now then once I have that set up then I start changing the shape as I'm dragging my finger on the inside to start creating will change the shape changing the volume a little bit the same thing on the outside the same thing with the bowl or the cup right I just start with that the profile and then kind of flush it out spreading everything else out we'll go ahead and flare this top a little bit flare the bottom a little bit we can go just use my finger and I'm really watching what what's happening with the clay on the outside as I press I'm watching to make sure I'm not creating any lines between the the I guess the stroke was my finger just push it out and create that volume that I'm looking for I never let it get to that point the most the time you only have to worry about that stuff I mean if you have the little cracks on the surface it's not gonna do anything except get filled in by glaze but yeah I mean for me I'm just I try to work wet and work quickly and get to the point like if you looked at this you'd see there's little little cracks on the surface becomes a little short but it's not going to impact the finish piece at all yeah I think it comes back to that idea of like just fussing as little as possible knowing knowing that the glaze will cover up some stuff you know you don't have to worry about like everything set that guy aside for a few we could go ahead and get this the rest of this guy go and I think how are we doing for time we'll get close scoring down the sides so as long as I get that could get this body together we're gonna make this happen confident okay so the way this pattern is set up it's basically you know three straight sections that's how it's going to assemble the middle part first and then the other sections so I've scored down the sides add a little bit of slip actually you know what it's been a while since I've done this and I'm just remembering one thing I need to do is assemble this with the face up because I want to make sure that the lines all line up I didn't write that down in my pattern I should have good okay so it's lined up there so now I can go ahead and compress that make sure that joints in there really well right so you can see the most part the lines line up or they're very close so now flip this over and I could do the same thing on the other side using the French rolling pin oops cause I'm going to do the same thing we're really looking at the lines to try to get them to line up so we've got this continuous design I got some slip on the surface and that's generally something I try not to do because then it gets all over the tools and becomes kind of harder to handle let's go ahead an assemble its top section just compress this together really well and now I used this bowl there's a little support put a little foam inside and it's just like a little bit of a support I don't use it for too much but I want to use this so I can start stretching it out so don't do this too much on the turntable to see I'm kind of gonna start doing the same thing I'll kind of do the same thing that I did on the other pieces where I'll go and stretch out the profile to make sure it's got those undulations on the outside so this is the delicate delicate operation on this piece this is like super wet so I can't push too hard otherwise it'll collapse but with any luck it'll stiffen up just enough as I'm working that'll hold together whenever I'm doing demos I try to do pieces that I know are gonna work out because it's a bummer when they don't like years ago I did this really big bowl like huge I was doing like eight eighth inch thick bowls but they were like this big and I would do this I had to flip it at some point and I think it was an aardvark clay or something down to Southern California I was doing it I had like two bats I was holding it and I do this thing where I could flip it up onto my head and then like slowly you know had a landing spot and I did that just went I was like ah such a bummer oh yeah totally everybody got a great laugh and actually liked that I messed up because they were like how do you make that look so easy [Laughter] Prabha probably maybe a little bit thicker than that but not much okay so I think this is kinda together so normally it's been more time I wouldn't rush so much but I do want to get this at least like to the close mock-up I was talking too much or something no it's good sometimes for demos maro just bite off more than I could chew right it's like it's like I generally work pretty fast but maybe you know the pace for the demo is a little bit different than yeah coming together okay so let's throw a bottom on it because that'll make it stick together better fold together try to make it fairly round like I'm already thinking about doing a series of these like because I haven't done them in a while I'm thinking like the next thing I'm gonna do like let me think about like darting this some sections so it changes the shape of like this bottom section it's just like super important I think to just play all the time with clay and not get too caught up and just doing one thing this is very thin I don't have any fingernails I can't ever pick anything up like nothing so I do this shape in a much larger size as well and when I worked larger I'll do these in like a quarter of an inch thickness it's a few pieces I do a little bit thicker like that those plates like I did one of those earlier that's a quarter of an inch thick when I do the larger version of this it's about this tall and it's about a quarter of an inch thick except for the top section to make them a little bit a little bit thinner here's the brayer roller to kind of attach it and then this would get stuck on top a lot of times with this top section I have to kind of color it in a little bit because it may be different so I'll just colouring it in kind of like just like if you're colouring on the wheel like I'll just kind of pinch and twist a little bit so it's going in stretch this out and then create a little bit of volume here we slip and slip and score and then put it together it's like yeah so like what I would you know I think that you know truthfully this was a little wetter than I'd like it but what I would do at this point is like spend a bunch of time just like on the cup like colouring stuff on in refining all the scenes kind of changing the volume you know sometimes if I get it together and it seems like it's kind of shrunk back in I'll just like once it's attached I'll just blow on it right to get it to puff out a little bit yeah you just blow on it it just expands it's like a balloon so and then make sure it's relatively straight and then you know if I want I may add a couple little handles like on this one ever no those little handles on the side kind of do it the same way that I did previously just just put some arms on it real quick so just make little coils and kind of do the same thing where I flatten them a little bit they just have to be really really thin because they won't make that curve otherwise right the tighter the curve you make with the clay the less likely it is to make it so they just kind of I'm just making this more like a mock-up at this point we get the idea what's something like that sorry I was a little struggling rushing for time but you guys got the point right okay well thank you all for hanging out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Orchard Valley Ceramic Arts Guild

Views: 123,734

Rating: 4.7940974 out of 5

Keywords: ovcag, pottery, clay, ceramics, soft slab, fuctional ware, slab, stoneware

Id: 4nhLgH_YAOM

Length: 86min 17sec (5177 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 17 2018