Throwing a Bowl- Back to Basics

okay let's just get into it so the biggest misconception about making a bowl is that you need to make it a bowl when you first start but like with any other shape what you want to do is you want to create the foundation of your pod which is your walls you want to determine how thick those walls are going to be how high your pods going to be all of that before you turn it into a bowl so you don't want to scream hey i'm making a bowl with that very first pulp so as a beginner you're able to really support a lot of clay underneath your walls um once you get more advantage you'll be able to start with a more narrow mound of clay but if i'm going to make a bowl this big i don't want to start with amount of clay this narrow because as i start to pull out if i'm not really good in the beginning those walls are going to start to fall so we're going to start with it a little wider to give ourselves some support under those walls just in case we yell bowl a little too soon so i'm going to start sort of with this disc now how do you know it's centered i tend to just draw a line on my that like that try and make sure that that circle is maintaining steady rotation so after a little bit of struggle with some air bubbles that i just uh quickly got rid of let me go ahead and i'm going to open up now i when i make a bowl i like to have a real good foot on my bowl what that's going to do is going to give me some negative space underneath the bowl so i can see that it's a bowl and not a cylinder so people always underestimate the size of a foot i like to make it about three quarters of an inch from the bottom and the reason why is not only am i going to allow for the foot but i'm also going to allow for the wall of my pot so that when i trim all this off there's still some room there so that it's evenly consistent with the walls so i'm about three quarters of the way down now i'm going to pull straight towards my left palm with several fingers and i'm gonna pull straight towards me for where the food's gonna sit and then i'm gonna scoop i'm gonna have a little bit of a of a rounded bottom as compared to a cylinder where i would have just aimed for a right angle now notice what i did with my left hand i allowed my left thumb to get in there so i can use the side of my finger to compress my lip now a lot of people get disturbed by all of the marks so i'm going to compress my floor i'm not going to compress my floor a lot with a bowl not until the end the more that you wipe with your sponge the more the clay comes off but the grog stays and then in the end your grog is going to shrink at a lesser rate than your clay so you're going to wonder why you're so rough and groggy down on the bottom and it's because the grog sticks up more than the clay once the pot's been fired so i try and maintain the uh i try not to compress my floor too much until i'm at the ends to get that water out so now again my wheel was going super fast and now i'm going to start to slow down okay so hopefully from this angle you can see a little better so the first thing i'm going to do is my corrective pull i'm going to make my walls even so less pressure there more pressure here and less pressure here so that my walls are evenly consistent now when i start with a bowl i'll start with my inside hand sort of in the center and as i start to scoop i'll wait until my hands meet where i'm going to start to pull so again i'm going to do a lot of pressure here and almost no pressure here what that's going to do is it's going to make it so that i don't have to care about thick and thin anymore right now from here to here [Applause] from here to here is about consistent thickness i'm on a main street here in madison new jersey so fireman cops ambulances so i'm gonna start down here on the bottom again i'm gonna push in with my right hand to scoop up that clay and again notice that i'm going up i'm going a little bit out i'm insinuating that it's going to be a bowl but i'm not quite yelling in a bowl what's really important to a pole is that you keep your lip thick this thick rim of clay is going to support your walls and your shape visualize a bucket that bucket of uh that maybe you're using for your water has a thicker rim on the top that design is there so that it supports the sides of your walls we know that when that bucket cracks the walls are not as strong so i'm going to slow down my wheel a little bit more i'm going to scoop from the bottom i want to make it thinner on the bottom lots of pressure a little bit more pressure on my inside hand to make it a little bit of a bowl and now when i say thicker lip that doesn't mean i just take my hands off it means i continue the pull i just put less pressure so it's not a lot thicker it's maybe about a third thicker than the rest of my wall and i'm going to try and get one more pull out of this i'm going to try and get this clay down here into that pot so what i'm actually doing is i'm not bringing this clay and bringing it up here what i'm doing is i'm jacking up this with this so as i push put more pressure down on the bottom equally equal pressure on the inside what i'm doing is i'm just shoving some clay underneath this wall to make this taller there's no way of really bringing this clay up here [Music] at the same time i'm going to insinuate bowl a little bit more now when i'm making a bowl i tend to have my head all the way on the side especially when i do my next pull because i want to be able to see the profile another way you can see what's going on out here is by looking on the inside if you see that it's not smooth transition you'll know where to put more pressure and less pressure so now i'm going to go ahead and get the water out of the inside of my bowl sort of make sure that that rounded bottom is still round now the inside is what we really care about the outside remember we're going to be able to trim a lot of this out so as a beginner i'm able to leave a decent amount of clay here to support these walls if this went all the way in if i played with it too much this would start to droop down so now i'm going to go ahead i'm going to do what i call a shaping pull now i can do that with my hands i can start on the bottom and literally just support put my sponge where i want that to end up push up against the sponge and start to go up but a slightly more advanced way is to use a rubber rib so i'm a fan of the rubber ribs the kemper hard ones it's going to give me a little bit more support i wish it had a hole in it there are some that have holes in them but they tend to be a little thinner so i have the bevel of it facing me i'm holding it with my non-dominant hand what i'm going to actually do is i'm going to start at the top you may not have seen this before but i believe this is the best way to do this i'll explain more in the in a bit so i'm going to put my sponge all the way out here because this is where i want my lip to end up and remember i kept that lip thick so if i stretch it it won't get too thin and i'm just slowly gradually going down and as i start to go down i'm going to put a decent amount of pressure and when i get to the bottom i'm going to notice i'm going to be able to put a lot of pressure so here we go elbows down on my legs at all times my head's coming down on the bottom here so i can see what i'm doing and i'm going to literally stretch that bowl into the shape that i want it to be now although when i get to the bottom there's nothing really supporting my other my rib hand the base of the clay is now why did i start at the top well on the top you're able to put let's just throw a number out there 30 pounds of pressure but on the bottom you're able to put let's say 60 pounds of pressure if we start at the problem bottom doing 60 pounds of pressure by the time we hit this part and we realize that we have to lessen up that pressure it's probably too late your wall probably went like this already but if we start at the top we can put that 30 pounds of pressure and then by the time we realized we could put more you can add more pressure without it affecting this part of your bowl so what i was aiming for is this sort of roundish um half a sphere bowl so there's lots of different bowls you watch some of my other videos we talk about fruit bowl ramen noodle bowl salad bowl and they all have different purposes to me what makes something a bowl is this rounded inside as compared to the cylinder that square now what we want to care about is that rounded inside we want to make sure that we get a smooth transition this is sort of your visual on a bowl now i do not like to just leave my lip um kind of starkly cut off like that i always like to give it some sort of tension between the table and the lip um i want to almost create this as my focal point so i'm going to put my right finger a little bit lower than my left and i'm just gonna create a little bit of a visual line here because i bite my nails i tend to have my own uh my own decorating tools attached to my fingers in the forms of cuticles and nails all right so now i'm going to call that a bowl so as you can see i didn't tell this clay it was going to be a bowl until close to the end now when i cut out a cylinder i usually hold this this way and i usually go straight down i can't do that there's a bowl in the way so i'm going to turn my tool slightly towards me so the blade is facing me but it's still facing up hold it with my left hand on top elbows around my legs and i just want to clean off that extra and come out the reason why i'm cleaning off that extra is that maybe you have a thin lip maybe you have a thin bottom if you leave that inch and a half of clay on the bottom it's going to dry a lot slower and then when your other parts start to dry it's going to shrink and it's going to crack all right there we go one of the pro tips i always try and do is always try and clean my bat my wheels not going super fast but i want this bowl to start drying so that i can get it off the bat so i want to create a dry atmosphere by having a wet messy bat you're just you're you're slowing down that drying process and there you go good luck guys

Channel: Mudgirl Pottery

Views: 107,913

Keywords: potteryvideos, throwingpots, standardclay, thrownpottery, ceramics, learntothrowpots, perfectcylinder, pottery, clay, handmadevideos, clayaddicts, mudclaystudio, mudgilrpottery, throwabowl

Id: UJFkrJ_UQs8

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2022