Tips for Throwing a Perfect Tall Cylinder | ADAM FIELD

[Music] so I'm gonna start off by throwing a cylinder just a basic cylinder here you know we can just talk about the basic mechanics of what it takes to get the clay moving you know from a low centered mound up to a taller cylinder that was something that it took me a while to actually get a grasp of where my hands should be placed and what is happening with the clay to get it to rise up into a cylinder so you'll notice here I've wedged it into a mound that is pretty close to being centered already the idea is that one step kind of leads into the next and kind of helps with making that next step in the process and I'll use the the Rings on the wheel head to get it even closer to - centered on the wheel head and and sometimes kind of just tap it into into place or just kind of shift it and then I'll start by having the wheel going slowly and slap centering and then I seal down the clay to the wheel head at this point and so I'm starting to Center here so the idea that I'm going with on centering is that if you have a mound of clay that's off-center you know it's one thing to try to Center the whole thing by pushing you know like like I was taught in the first place to kind of bear in with your elbow and lean into it but it's one thing to try to send it that way the other thing that I try to incorporate into centering is the idea that if you're using one fingertip it's so much easier to Center just a little space just a little bit of surface there and so then you have these high ridges that are off-center and it's easier with this hand then to take those smaller spots and Center them down and so that's kind of the basic mechanics of what I'm working with when I Center but of course it's all kind of happening at once and so these fingertips over here with a sponge keeping things wet going on that side and then the butt of my left hand coming along and taking any of those high ridges that I've made with my fingertips and centering them so this is going to be a cylinder that's taller than it is wide and and so I just Center the clay as such now for opening something that I do that's a little bit different I think than what I first learned was instead of just making an opening with one or two fingers down in there and then struggling to open that whole big mound of clay up I'll actually use three or four fingers here and with the wet sponge go and actually using this as kind of the tool that I'm opening with and with my right hand just kind of pushing down keeping things on center and opening down to where I have about you know a quarter of an inch between the floor of the pot and the wheel head and so the idea here is a flat floor with about a ninety degree transition from the floor to the wall is what I like to put out there as a practicing assignment to my students something I think really useful in having a very specific assignment and goal to work towards instead of maybe just throwing a mound of clay on to the wheel and saying hey I'm just gonna throw and see what I can come up with so the idea is to be is to to get a cylinder that has even thickness from up high down to where that wall meets the floor and that can be a tricky thing to do so what I'm doing as far as my hand configuration goes is the inside fingers are going to be pushing the wall out and as that mound of pushed out clay comes up on the outside the outside hand those fingers are gonna actually be a little bit closer to me and a little bit lower than the fingers on the inside and the idea is that you're stretching that clay and the wall out and coming behind it with this outside hand and pushing that clay right back to where it was and so the only place for that stretched clay to go really is to raise the the wall of the cylinder so I'll demonstrate that here I'm going to bring the rim in just a little bit I'm always really careful to keep the rim narrower than the width of the base when I'm throwing because it's you know it's easier to to keep it in there than it is to try to to put it back later on when you have a tall pot so you'll see I'm pushing that clay from the inside hand out and stretching it following up with that outside hand and pushing the clay right back to where it was stretched from sometimes I put a little bit of extra time and attention download just because it is harder to get that clay up from the base and so I'm really kind of focusing on what my fingertips are doing how much that clay is getting stretched down there and going a bit slower over that bottom section so that I can really get the most out of the height gain on that part right at the end there I don't know if you notice I kind of compressed with my thumb so really as I finished the pull I'm compressing from the inside the outside and then finishing that compression off on the rim with the top as well at this point just for this demo I'm gonna cut this cylinder in half so that we can take a look at the inside of the wall this is a bit of a thick cylinder but I leave it thick for this demonstration so you can see not only with me talking about how this movement of the clay works but we can actually see it in action here so that inside hand is coming along and pushing the clay out and you can see it stretches it thinner at that point and then the outside hand is following it up and you can see that it really is an efficient way to get that wall gaining some height [Music] you

Channel: Ceramic Arts Network

Views: 217,736

Rating: 4.8984046 out of 5

Keywords: CAN Videos, CAN Presents, CAD Presents, Adam Field, Ceramic Arts Network, Throwing, Cylinders, Throwing a cylinder, tall, pottery, ceramics

Id: ge7b5XKTEAg

Length: 6min 37sec (397 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2018