Three Variations on Making a Simple Cylindrical Slab Cup With Three Different Handles

[Music] this video is going to show how to create a slab mug from a rectangular pattern and with a flat bottom now I'm going to show three variations of this so in addition to the straight sided straight bottom one I'm also going to show a mug that has a belly to it so it was the same form that I belied with a flat bottom and then this one which is also bellied and I have arched the bottom by pushing it out on the inside and I added a foot ring all of these are made from a basic cylinder and you can expand beyond this to any sort of cylindrical form like a bowl picture things like that here is an example of a finished a couple of versions where I bellied it out just to give you an idea this pattern has shrunk you can kind of see the the shrink rate it's quite a bit this is about a 14 percent shrink rate with this clay body that I'm using let's set this aside and we'll get started you can use any clay for making slab mugs this clay that I'm using this is all scrap clay that my students had used in the past and my trick that I tell them is keep those scraps really loose squirt them down and then when you wedge it together it will reabsorb the moisture so every time they roll out slabs I have them keep those slabs loose and then they squirt them down and then they can re-roll so I'm using a template that I have some pre-made templates at at school you just want to make sure that it is even that it's not you know all wonky and everything and that the ends are going to match up when they meet you can make it whatever size you want to for a template I will put that in the video description but one consideration is having it wide enough so you can actually fit your hand in there so you can clean it say for instance on this one this one is just a little too narrow to actually fit my hand in there so it's much more difficult to work with so I'm gonna take my wedge clay I'm going to roll it out and I'm going to use the hardwood slab sticks now in my classroom I have them color-coordinated for a mug I'm going to use the quarter inch thick slab sticks and when you are rolling you need to be aware of rolling in multiple directions so as I roll a little bit in one direction I'm going to flip it or rotate it roll in another direction now obviously I need a long skinny piece of clay but you don't want to just solely do everything and only one direction because you want to have more of an even compression of your particles I usually have the kids if they're working on sets of things they could roll out a piece of clay big enough to cut two of these rectangles out of at one time it helps them go a little bit faster okay so let's just check the length we'll see I'm getting pretty close there so as I roll I might just rotate it a little bit to kind of stretch it on the diagonal perhaps a little bit as well okay notice that I keep lifting it from the surface and I'm working on a canvas surface it's very difficult to work with slabs on a surface where it's stuck and canvas has the advantage of being porous so it absorbs a little bit of water so it does release now you know that you're down to the thickness when you can hear the pin on either side I will then set these to the side now and the next step that I will do is I take a rib and I will compress the surface this is one of the mud tool ribs I will put the link in the video description you will find a Google Doc in the video description that I have of some of my favorite and recommended tools for things that are either Amazon links or some other non Amazon links of things that aren't on Amazon I like to rib both sides the ribbing does two things first of all it smoothes it but that's really not the most important thing the most important thing is that it's compressing it it makes it stronger if you wanted a really smooth surface you could just work on smoother canvas or say like a bedsheet that that produces a really nice smooth surface so obviously I have a lot more clay than I needed for this but obviously in my temple my template will meet just fine now you can use different items to texture clay I'm going to just use the one that I used in this video which is a roller for my students when we're doing our textured slab project you can use any of the things that I have whether it's rollers texture match different things that I might have in my texture drawers but this little roller is a great little roller if your clay is a little on the wet side which mine is not mine's pretty pretty good but I just wanted to show you this as an option you could take a little bit of cornstarch kind of lightly dust some cornstarch so it's kind of acting like say flour with pie crust and this is just you know regular old cornstarch that you buy at the grocery it will add just a little bit of dryness so when you roll you don't end up by getting stick äj-- so I try to roll smoothly as I'm doing this I kind of keep my hands moving as I'm rolling it and then I'm going to roll one more section so I have a piece for the bottom okay I'm gonna release that again now this long strip is going to be where I'm going to make the mug and the mkm they do have a cool roller board that I want to try out I'll do another video when I get one of those to show you how those work but they're kind of cool that it's designed to help you roll consistent pressure on your roller okay so I've got that cut out and I should have said I used a needle tool when I did that and I'm just going to set the other piece aside I'll come back to that in a minute now whenever you make a cylinder okay when you bring those edges together you want to be aware that an end a joint like this a butt end is never as strong a joint as a bevel if they overlap this this little example it's just just some wood that has been cut on a bevel this shows you what can happen when your ends come together and you bevel them they would overlap like that and it's an easier seem to put together okay whereas if you had the butt joint like this that's just much harder to blend without it blowing apart so to put a bevel on this you can easily take a knife okay and if you are doing it with a knife you want to hold the knife at the same angle when you cut the opposite end so if I cut at this angle here I'm gonna be taking off the top and if I cut at the same angle down here I'm going to be taking off a little bit of an undercut underneath there I do have another tool that I'll show you though that makes it a little bit easier and at true confessions I wasn't really paying that closely attention since I was talking I probably should have lined this up just a little bit more skewed so my patterns just a wee bit off but for the demonstration I think that's okay now before I make it to the cylinder I'm going to think about the upper edge and smoothing it whenever you have a cup and you're going to put your mouth on the rim you really don't want texture because that feels awkward when you're drinking out of it so I'm taking a rib and just smoothing a little bit on this upper rim I am going to be trimming that edge again I could have avoided doing the texture altogether but I wanted to show you this because sometimes you can't avoid it so I wanted to show you how you could do that all right so I have smoothed it but it did also make my edge quite thin which isn't altogether bad because I did want to thin my edge a little bit anyhow so I'm just gonna line this up and then you can use a needle tool or knife just recut your edge to make sure it looks nice and clean and I just trimmed it a little bit off on that side there okay now I'm a rectangle again so next step is I'm going to bevel the end I can either do it with a knife or I want to show you this cool little tool I have a few of these for my classroom I wish I knew really how to pronounce this I'm assuming it might be I am but I'm not really sure these tools are super cool this is a bevel cutter and it has two different angles I think this one is a 45 and I'm not exactly sure what that one is right there maybe a 60 I don't know but I'm going to use this one to do my bevel so the way that you do it is you line up the wood edge with the edge of the clay and you just kind of draw that across and I kind of hold this end right here as the wire gets to the end to make sure that I don't stretch it and make it all funky there now to do the other one remember it has to be the same angle I'm gonna flip this over and do the other side it's easier to flip a knife you can't really flip this cutter so instead I have to flip the clay alright now that I have both ends beveled I'm ready to make it into a cylinder you want to score the ends and I know that sometimes some people will say if it's really wet clay you don't need to score you can go ahead and just press it together for my students I want you to take the extra effort of scoring because I just want to make sure that you have good enough craft that you're not gonna have cracking then I'm going to slip I like to use a little bit of water you could use prepared slip if you want to and I'm only slipping one end then I carefully pick it up kind of supporting it all the way around and then if you can see I'm over lapping the bevel okay I'll hold this up so you can kind of see you can see how it's angled there and I'm over lapping it and then I gently press it now when I work with textured slabs like this I usually don't try to blend the outside because I like to show off the fact that it is a textured slab so I do blend the inside because I like to make sure that it's nice and watertight you can use whatever tool you want say for instance you could use I really like this Kemper tool this wood tool I think it's W t12 my former colleague mrs. Valentine used to tell her students it was the wensel because I always call it the wooden tool that looks like a pencil this one that there are wooden knives of different sizes some of my students have shorter ones in their bins I'm just using this one because I haven't had it handy so I'm totally blending I'm gonna flip that the other direction to making sure that the seam on the interior is completely blended so hopefully you can kind of see that that is completely blended down in there okay now remember that one side is the top one side is the bottom it looks like I have just a little ding right there I'm going to add just a tiny bit of water and compress over that if you have a little fault like that you want to try to fix it before it continues to dry okay now I'm going to flip it upside down and there are two different ways you could go about making the bottom you could say take that extra clay which is what I'm gonna use I'm gonna use that extra texture and clay that I have and I could say take it make sure it's circular set it on top cut it out and then I would I would have a size that matches you know what it would be silly if I did it like this I meant to flip the texture over so the texture was on the backside my mistake so I could again put it on there I could cut it out and then attach it instead of that I am going to use I have a little pattern here okay depending on exactly how big you want to make it do you want to make it the exact size do you want to make it a little bit bigger well I want to make mine just a wee bit bigger so I'm going to take my pattern I'm gonna trim this out and I'm trimming it out of the center because that's where my texture was on the opposite side I could turn it over to cut it out okay so there we go there's my texture now I'm going to turn this upside down and I'm going to turn this technically that's right side up now and I'm going to prep both the surfaces by scoring [Music] okay I've scored the top of the bottom and the bottom of the side I've also scored a little bit more toward the inside and just down a little bit on the inside edge of the wall because I will be adding a coil to this now sometimes that I know many artists who will work and they don't put a coil on the inside and that is perfectly fine if you know you're good enough that your joint is gonna be fine you don't need a coil for my beginning students I definitely recommend a coil now I do want to put a really nice amount of scoring and a nice amount of slip on this because I really want this to be well anchored so I did slip both pieces I want to make sure this looks very round and then I position it on top of the circular base that I cut out okay now you might see that my edge is sticking out just a little bit and I am okay with that okay I'm gonna do something with it a little bit okay I'm just gonna gently tap it and now I am gonna do one other thing to get this to anchor on a little bit more I'm going to use a little pony roller and I'm pressing down right above where the wall is it's really anchor that okay then there are different ways that you can address this like I'm just gonna kind of taper this bevel it up a little bit you don't have to do it this is just like a little just a little aesthetic thing I'll kind of fix that up a little bit there but that helps to anchor it so I know that that that wall is fairly anchored now I'm going to secure the wall by adding a coil when I add a interior coil to something like this I usually make it about pencil thick and once you've rolled your coil you want to go ahead and score again this may be overkill for a lot of people I'm making this a little extra secure for my students who are beginners yeah that's enough and then we're gonna add some slip or just some water which create slip and then I'm going to position this down in there let me position it and then I'll show you my coil broke and I'm adding a little section right there all right so hopefully you can see the coil down in the base of the seam in the corner so now I'm gonna take a tool and blend the coil into the bottom as well as up into the side use whatever tool you like but I really do like the hooked end of this wood knife tool it's very handy again link will be in the video description for all of these [Music] now I have the coil blended and I'm just gonna smooth it a little bit all right coil is blended now let's talk about how we could address the bottom here you could quite simply just take the bottom and kind of smooth it like this okay you could trim away a little bit the excess but I kind of like the fact that the bottom shows the fact that it's slab and it's really it's not that much that's sticking out it's just a little proud piece of it okay now there is a trick that let's say hypothetically I just want it straight like this there is a trick that you can use to try to keep it round you could use something like a solo cop except this is a little bit short and maybe I need a fatter Cup or I like to have a nice really round funnel that's handy and then if you just gently press it it'll help you to get it nice and truly round so you want to make sure it's nice and truly round prior to it getting leather hard now right in here too if you have any spots where it kind of sags in you want to make sure that those spots are looking pretty good and even I can use a turntable perhaps using the turntable and kind of looking at it from the side definitely helps that aspect helps you to get a little bit more even alright now this is a fine start for a cylinder cup but I wanted to show you a couple other options on how you could take and transform this into say something like this okay and for that I've got a couple more pieces okay so this cup has a bottom somewhat similar to this except I actually kind of trimmed a little bit extra off I took my knife and I trimmed a little bit extra off so whereas this has a little bit more clay down here this I trimmed some of it away hopefully that makes sense okay so there are different ways that you can address it but now if I wanted to say expand this and make it be a little bit more rounded what you can do is I usually hold the top and bottom and I'm gonna take my fingers and I'm going to balloon this out a little bit like this then when you get to the seam over here you just have to be gentle you don't want to pop through the seam you want to kind of stretch on either side of the seam there we go and occasionally you'll get a little bit of surface cracking that happens when you do this because if you have a really nice textured surface and then you stretch it some of that texture might crack a little bit and I think it's kind of cool sometimes though if you are glazing it with a great texture showing glaze it kind of shows up and I think that's alright little if I had some air bubbles in there of course I could always fix those a little bit with a little paintbrush which I'll do that in a minute now right here where I've been stretching this scene I want to take a little bit of a paint brush kind of come in here clean that up a little bit okay now on the rim if I want to do just a straight rim that's kind of angling up that is totally fine but I want to show you how you can take and perhaps flex the rim out so I hold my hand and I'm just kind of stabilizing the rim so I can flex it out right above my hand now this is all done while it's still plastic in the plastic stage and you want to be careful you don't want to go to too far with an angle this is really the limit I would not go any further than this with the angle of the rim because if it angles out too much and it's a drinking cup it gets super awkward and you can spill it on yourself okay so that has a little bit more of a chubby belly and I just want to look at it and make sure it looks relatively even now this will stand a reason but when you have a straight cylindrical one versus one with a belly the one with the belly will contain a lot more liquid and then this is ready to get leather hard of course when you put it on a board again make sure that it's nice and round because since I stretched it it's no longer that round [Music] okay the other way that you could address a bottom that I wanted to show you this one was a little bit bigger and it was standing out just a little bit more crowd you could kind of roll it a little bit on the table and that kind of rolls it up that's a completely different look that you can have [Music] now for the one that had the road bottom I wanted to show you the third option for a straight salient cylindrical cup and that is curving the bottom out and putting a foot ring on it so this one I've already made the belly like I did on the previous one and then for the bottom I'm going to use my fingers on the inside and I'm going to gently and slowly stretch the bottom the clay that we're using is grog so I'm not really inclined to use a sponge because if I did I would really be removing the tiny particles and leaving leaving behind a bigger particles that's all gritty and groggy so instead I'm just using my fingers to stretch [Music] right down here I just have a little place that I need to blend okay so with this now rounded now I can take and make a foot ring see like I did on this one and for that I'll just take some of my scrap clay that I had left over I'm going to take my scrap clay and just make sure I have a nicely textured piece I often have little foot ring templates in my classroom but I'll show you how you can make it without a template as well depending on how tall you want it okay I'm just going to make this as thick as the slab sticks [Music] and then there's my foot ring should be a pretty even thickness again since I'm making this from a slab I want to make sure that I'm actually cutting the ends at a bevel where it's going to go together so you can think about how big do you want your foot ring a little shorter now we could use the double cutter like I did before or I'll just show you how you could cut this easily with a knife if you overlap them like that you can cut them both at the same time and it's the same angle and it's the right length I'm going to score the ends and a little bit of water and slip overlap the bevels land the inside of that wall now when you go to attach this okay my wall is already angled so it is kind of nice to take this upper edge which is flat and just gently angle it so if I I'm taking the interior edge and kind of angling it downward so I'm holding my rib at an angle to slant it so it's going to hopefully match the contour a wee bit more okay so that that contour matches a little bit more now okay now I recommend when you place a foot ring on that you stand up and you look straight down on it and you make sure that it looks centered like when you put it on a wheel that it looks centered from up above and also look at it side to side and make sure that it looks even which that does then I'll mark it on the interior take this off if you have time to wait it's kind of handy if you just allow this to stiffen up a little bit but with my students usually they don't have time you know with the shortened class bells that we have they have to get done whatever they can in the class time that we have so I'm going to score the bottom of the cup I'm going to score the bottom edge of the foot which has the slight bevel I'm going to score the interior edge the foot as well because I'm going to be adding another little coil now one thing to keep in mind if you do wait to put a foot on you want to make sure that the foot is the same exact moisture as the the cup itself now one one thing to keep in mind this here's my seam I want to line my scene up the seam up of the cup with the foot okay and then again if this were just a little bit firmer a little bit closer to leather hard it would be a little easier to do this it's not just I'm going to kind of press this on I'm going to make sure that it's looking even as it sits all right now the interior as I said I am going to make a small coil coil is blended to the side of the foot and then I will take and blend it to the bottom of the cup turn this tool sideways get rid of some of my tool marks now if this moved at all I do want to make sure that it's not caved in okay and then the last thing that you may want to do is you could flex that foot ring if you want to give it a little bit of an angle once it's attached I sometimes just flex it a little bit there we go these loose scraps are the scraps that I talked about earlier that while they're still in that plastic stage you just want to spritz them down a little bit put them back in your clay bag so they can reabsorb that moisture and they'll be good for the next person to roll slabs now on the day that you make a cup form and it's very plastic I would go ahead and make a handle as well the handle is not going to be attached until both the handle and the cup for my lever hard but if you can go ahead and make them then you know you can dry them together and they should be ready to attach at the same time so when I show my kids how to make handles I start off by making a tapered coil that kind of resembles a carrot this is a technique that I picked up several years ago from Sandy Parenteau Z she always referred to it as the carrot slam and I still call it that way with my kids because it's a great descriptor so I'm going to make more handles than I need because typically your first couple handles might not come out well so if if I'm making three cups I would probably make five to six handles the way that I do this is I would take this coil now and I'm going to smack it down or slam it down onto the canvas lift it up now normally I would use a sponge and wet this and stretch it but because I want to texture this and this clay is fairly plastic I am just going to use my finger to shape this so it's flat and it's tapered it's skinnier here okay then I'm going to roll it to get a great little texture on it okay and then depending on what your shape is you're going to arch it around so it's going to fit your mug so this this one would be cut off about like there that would probably be like a two fingered handle maybe something similar to this and this has a little addition I'll show you that later so for my students we will store the handles kind of stuck onto a tray and then you're going to put your cup with it and cover it with plastic [Music] this one I'm going to do a little neatness like right there it bumps out I'm just going to tap it down to make it a little bit more even okay now for this one I'm going to actually bend it in the opposite direction I'm going to take the small end and bend it so this is a different look another possibility that you have for a handle so that would be more similar to this one I use the skinny end on the top lip there [Music] for this last one I'm actually going to hook it around so it will kind of form more of a loop and I'll be trimming it off but I wanted a different shape with it now for my students to get these other hard usually you won't keep your handle and cups together on the same tray you can certainly put a dry fabric towel over them if you would want and then I recommend that you cover it with a bag to help make sure it that they don't dry out too much you definitely always have to cover your handles occasionally I have I have people who forget to cover their handles and they come in the next day and are way too dry to use okay this cup is leather hard that I made yesterday so it's holding its form quite nicely the handle has dried along with the cup so they both are equal in moisture and they are ready to attach now a handle when you make it usually will have extra clay on it or at least when you make it in this manner has a lot of extra clay which I would trim off obviously I would not be attaching it like this that would be an outrageously big handle a handle should have enough room to get the fingers in that you intend to without a ton of extra space now I'm going to choose to put my handle directly on the seam and that does help to hide any imperfections that perhaps I might have now when I determine how big I want the handle to be I often hold it up behind the cup so I can kind of get a sense of angles and depth and then when I have a handle you know sighs that looks pretty good to me I usually mark it so I'm gonna just hold that up behind it with my markings and I kind of like the way that that one looks so now when I cut the handle I want to make sure that I'm cutting it evenly when I cut it across okay so this one is not cut even so if you can see that you can see it's it if you cut it crooked and you put it on crooked it's going to lean to one side so I'm going to just trim this a little bit more and I also often will round it a little bit or I round it to get it to match the contour of the cup since the cup wall is round same width down here I make sure that it looks even so it's not tilted and then I'll place it and I trim just a little bit more off of this I'm going to trim up at the top it's a little trial and error to get it the right size that you like all right I like that size now when attaching I'm going to mark the placement I'm just marking it with a needle tool whatever you choose to use whatever you like the best is fine so when I have marked that now I'm going to take some sort of tool and score where the handle is going to go and I usually over score it just a little bit I have a little more scoring than really needed okay so I have both that Cup and the handle are scored I'm going to add some water which of course is creating slip and I'm just gonna run my scoring tool one more time there we go okay now with my hand on the inside I'm going to push that handle in place at the top and the bottom okay now when you look at the angle of this this angle does sweep down a little bit right here and it sweeps down right here so a lot of times what I do like to do is get in there and just gently blend underneath there I'm gonna blend it okay that may be just a teensy bit down here I'm gonna do that because this is a textured slab I'm not adding the coils that I often do on some of my handles I often add a little coil up at the top of the handle on the top and the top on the bottom so like the inside there I often add a little coil that I can blend but because this is again textured slab I don't want to do that because I don't want to compete with my texture or damage any of my texture okay so now I want to think about the contour alright so as I look at this I'm going to watch this contour right here and if I have a couple of fingers in there kind of pinches so what I'm gonna do is push this out at the bottom a little bit nice push push that side in so I just kind of reshaped the form so I can get my fingers in there a bit more comfortably and then I'm just tidying up with a paintbrush make sure that any little seam is completely sealed with a slip okay if you wanted to say add a thumb rest or a pinky rest you could certainly do that like down here if I want to add a pinky rest I'm gonna make a bean and I will pinch it and I can add that on so I'm gonna put it down here the bottom where the pinky would be and again I'm not gonna do a lot of blending with that since it is a textured handle there I'll just kind of take my paint brush over it but then as I'm drinking I can hold it with that with that little rest why do you would push it down a little bit more [Music] so that is the application of a handle one of the other things that I want to do is I'm going to just tidy up the interior I like to use a paintbrush that way if you have any tool marks down in there you are going over them I cannot use a sponge with this particular clay because this clay is very grog and if I sponge I will leave a very groggy surface behind there we go I'll go ahead and I will put the other handles on the other two cups a little bit more quickly without the dialog so much and I'll show you how those go and now this step I am showing how I smooth the upper rim by dipping my fingers in water smoothing over those sharp corners really here I'm placing the next handle on this is the one where it's a little bit smaller at the top and a little fatter at the bottom but the placement and the attachment is very similar to the other one and then I will also be rounding the rim cleaning the inside with a paintbrush using the funnel to make sure it's round now this particular handle is the one that's more shaped like a loop where it sweeps up at the bottom so it's rather loop shaped I'm going to show a little frozen section here of it so you can see how it sweeps down at the top and it sweeps up at the bottom [Music] and that's how to make three variations of the slab cylinder mug with three handles [Music] you [Music]

Channel: KaransPotsAndGlass

Views: 113,076

Rating: 4.8757763 out of 5

Keywords: clay, ceramic, ceramics, cup, slab, mug, stein, demonstration, demo, tutorial, best, handbuild, handbuilt, handbuilding, texture, texturing, mkm, MKM, roller, cylinder, pattern, balloon, expand, alter, alterations, variation, variations, handbuilder, technique, handle, handles, footring, foot, ring, different, ways, show, high, school, teach, teacher, class, learn, Karan, Witham, Walsh, cylindrical, how, to, variety, beginner, learning, teaching

Id: ipUZEXKrvUA

Length: 48min 57sec (2937 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2019