Two Ways to Make EASY Pinch Pot Pumpkins! Great for Beginners!

[Music] [Music] this video is a little tutorial on how to make pinch pot pumpkins pinch pots are of course one of the beginning techniques that people are often exposed to in ceramics and this is just a super simple technique that my beginning students can easily do young kids can do it and even kids that might need assistance from adults can do it as well i'm showing two different methods of making these hollow pinch pop pumpkin forms and my students will also be making not only one for themselves but they're going to be making some little itty bitty ones that they can gift to someone in the school all the pumpkins will have a single vent hole just a vent hole to allow the water vapor to escape to prevent any moisture in them during firing so please check out the video description for my google doc of recommended materials and tools and also i will have a link to the handmade tool that i show in the video good luck and drop me any questions or comments that you might have below all right just like anytime you have scrap clay you would want to wedge it and get it prepped if it's brand new clay you could probably do this right off of a brand new chunk now this is going to be a pinch pot similar to some of the pinch pots that we've done in the past with a pinch pot i'm going to start with a ball now this is kind of big this is about the limit that i can pinch because i need to get my thumb inside and be able to pinch it so as i stick this in i'm putting my thumb all the way to the bottom and then i pinch my fingers up against the thumb leaving the thickness about as thick as my finger or my pinky now this is going to be a very simple pinch pot so i'm not terribly concerned about the thickness being thick enough that i can use the shredders or the sure forms this is going to be more simple than that so as i do this i work my way up the wall so i always pinch the base part first and then i'm gradually working up the wall again i'm trying to be sensitive to keeping the wall thickness even as i come up now as i get to the top edge i'm not making the top edge a great deal wider i'm i am kind of keeping it angled in because i'm going to be closing off this form all right so now i would say that the thickness feels pretty uniform with this now i'm going to bring it in now as i squeeze this in you want to be very attentive to look for vertical creasing because if you have any vertical crease marks that start to occur you want to immediately blend over those so if you can see like right here i immediately blend side to side over those i'm not using any water i'm just blending if your clay is fairly dry you might have more difficulty with this my clay is definitely in that nice plastic stage and again i just bring it in closer and closer the whole time i'm looking for creasing that might be occurring on the inside and i'm blending over it on the inside and the outside and i blend over it so this is a great way to make a simple hollow form from one piece i show my students how to make shakers and things like that out of this and gradually i push it all the way until i know it's going to come together now i could oh i want to blend that i could perhaps slip and score as this comes together but this clay is so plastic i'm not i'm not really concerned about it so i'm just gonna bring this together close it off blend over it now i have a big ball of trapped air which is okay because the trapped air is going to add a little bit of stability now i can begin to shape it and i could use a rib and here i'm just using the super soft red rib if you don't have one of these you can use oh let's say you could cut a a rib out of like an old hotel key or a credit card the nice thing about pumpkins is that they have an organic shape so they certainly don't have to be perfect now if you have a clay that is grogged like mine the one thing that i want to make you aware of is i'm not going to be sponging this clay because if i sponge a grogged clay i'll have gritty grog that's left behind on the surface instead i am just going to smooth with my fingers or with a rib as much as possible and i'm going to determine where do i want the bottom of it and i don't want it to flatten out too much i still want to keep it kind of roundish because it is a pumpkin and then i want to think about okay where do i want my top and my stem and then i can use a tool to kind of indicate where do i want the uh let's call them ribs of the of the pumpkin now my students have access to some little wooden knives they're the kemper wood knives if i take this and i'm just going to kind of press it at an angle if you can see i'm going to press it at an angle and then i'm going to come at it from the other side and i'll press it at an angle that kind of makes a divot so i can do that over the whole thing to create the ribs also i have some other tools like i've been making some other tools that have kind of like at this nice little angle and that does it in one fell swoop because it's angled like that i'll have link to these in the video description so that's a pretty good sized pumpkin made on the in the technique of a single pinch pot if i wanted to add say a little stem i can add something like this i'm going to add a little bit of texture to the stem and then i twisted it a little bit and for this addition i will score and slip and the slip that i'm using is just water on a paintbrush and i'm going to press that down real nicely i could blend it but i think i'm okay with the with that and right here on the bottom maybe i'll come in here and add a little bit more distinction all right so that's a pretty quick pumpkin i'm gonna let that get leather hard and then i can clean it up a little bit later the second way to make a pinch pop pumpkin would be to make it in two pieces i think that this uh might work better if you're trying to make a really large one because if you can't pinch a ball comfortably it's harder to manage it if it's a really big piece as a pinch so you take two balls and then you pinch each into the half cup and then i will attach them at the edges so now i have two half cups the diameters are about the same i will score and slip this is just i it has a few more steps so that's why i think the first way is a little bit easier for my students but you can use whatever method you prefer so now i have scored both halves slipped one i lined them up and the most important thing on this is getting a very very good tight blended seam so with a dry finger i'm going to take and create some friction as i pull this clay across and that should bond it pretty well there you don't want to see any evidence of the seam because if you see evidence of the seam it will probably be a weak spot so everything should be well blended and again i'm ending up with something that looks just like the other one so i can finish this off in the same manner and now i'm just smoothing the exterior with the soft red rib and my fingers just to really smooth out any lumps and dents and again i'll use this at an angle by pressing this at an angle to bring that line in and i'm just continuing kind of alternating the direction that i press that to kind of make a bee groove now i'm going back to the the little tool that i have made that already has the nice v groove to it and as i do that it kind of creates just a nice indent now i'm making the stem so kind of like i would have done with making a stamp but i'm texturing the exterior and then i give it a little twist to kind of give it that organic feel and attaching it by slipping and scoring and there i've got two ways to form pinch pop punk pumpkins and i decided to just tweak just a tad bit more before i allow these to get leather hard just adding a little bit more distinction to that v groove um especially as it comes up there near the stem now i wanted to show you how i make a really really tiny baby one so it's just a smaller ball but i'm doing everything exactly the same i bring it in smooth over the creasing but this time i'm kind of pinching up the extra where it came together and that will become my stem and i'm just working on smoothing it with my fingers as much as i possibly can trying to get that that shape a little bit defined there at the stem and once i get it nice and smooth and i kind of like the form of it then i'll be adding the lines of it okay and i'm going to use that little wooden tool and i just rock it going from the stem area to the center bottom and it's so fast and so easy and they're just so darn cute and now i'm just texturing the stem a little bit and then i'm going to add a little twist again now the big ones are at the leather heart state and for the final cleaning on those i'm just taking that again that soft red rib if you don't have one of these red ribs again you could cut one out of a credit card but if you want something really soft try something like a softer margarine dish lid you could cut ribs out of that but here i'm just really smoothing out the denting now i'm going to use my fingers and go in there and really smooth out any last little tweaks i'm kind of wiping my fingers on a slightly dampened towel that helps to get the clay off my fingers i can go in there and redefine the creasing a little bit more precisely and just make it have more of that pumpkiny organic feel going in there and trying to add a little bit more distinction and definition with that a little wood tool that i made sorry i'm holding it outside of the picture there a little bit but the cleaning of that is a little bit easier when it gets to the leather hard state and again i'm not using a shredder or a sure form on this i can just do it all by fingers because you know it's organic and it's okay if it's not exactly perfect now i'm putting a vent hole in the bottom the vent hole needs to go in each of these to allow the water vapor to escape during the firing so it won't blow up and the last one here i'm just again tweaking it a little bit using my fingers using a rib and redefining the creases and really the whole thing on these it probably took me i think it's probably three minutes of cleaning on each of these large ones and the pinching part was probably three to five minutes so they are so fast and uh i will be allowing these to dry i'm going to fire them after i have the vent holes and then i will show you another video when we get to the point where we're finishing them so you can see how we finish these cute little pumpkins i hope you try them and enjoy [Music] you

Channel: KaransPotsAndGlass

Views: 6,006

Rating: 4.9718308 out of 5

Keywords: Easy, beginner, kids, kid, children, art, teach, teacher, class, classroom, studio, best, video, instruction, instruct, demo, demonstration, show, how, to, build, form, construct, pumpkin, pumpkins, fall, autumn, decoration, decorations, decor, theme, halloween, carve, sculpt, hollow, ball, spheres, fire, kiln, vent, venting, explode, prevent, air, water, vapor, explosions, exploding, sculpting, basic, pinch, pinching, pinched, pot, construction, handbuild, handbuilt, cute, adorable, helpful, karan, karen, pots, stoneware, ceramic, clay, earthenware, ceramics

Id: ordDxuylSK8

Length: 15min 8sec (908 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021