Practice, Practice, Practice
I have a week break from teaching at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design (RMCAD) between the Spring and Summer term and today I spent the afternoon practicing throwing on the wheel. Originally, I had planned to throw for a solid eight hours, however my community college classes are still in session and that eight was whittled down to three hours.
My goal was to practice my pulls and try to keep the pot centered after each pull. The pull is how you form the sides of the pot and get its height. A well-made pot is centered both on the inside and the outside as well at the top and the bottom. I’ve gotten much better at centering my clay on the wheel, but keeping the pot centered in these four areas is proving to be on ongoing challenge, hence the need to practice. I also worked on making my bottoms closer to a quarter inch. I’m notorious for having extra thick bottoms which then make the pot heavy at the base.
My Saturday instructor was also after me for working with too much clay, so per her request, I measured each ball out to 1.5 lbs. Both my Wednesday and Saturday instructors have said that you should be able to pull a pot that is five inches tall with 1.5 lbs. The problem for me is I need my pots to be taller than five inches for them to function for what I need. Bud vases aside of course, those are perfect small scale, but my Saturday instructor noted they are also difficult to create as their shape is complex especially for a beginner. So, I put practicality aside for today and focused on making a series of five-inch pots or rather cylinders which is what the foundation is for creating any vase, or bowl.
First, I gathered all the clay I had in my studio which included both Stoney White and Porcelain clay and formed seven balls of clay that were 1.5 lbs. Next, I gathered my tools and set to work. It proved to be a challenging day, the first pot with the Stoney White clay worked out well but the base was still a little on the heavy side. From there on it was downhill with the rest of the balls of Stoney White clay – I’m thinking the clay was too wet as it would either not stick to the wheel or the walls collapsed after about the third pull because they were just too moist. I made my little rainbows with the clay which is what you do to help get the moisture out and moved onto the porcelain.
Unlike the Stoney White clay, the porcelain was a wee bit on the dry side. I’ve not touched the bag of porcelain clay in probably over a year so no surprise there. Being the optimist that I am, I thought I’d try and give it a go anyway, I had enough to make three balls. I learned last week at my Wednesday night class that if your clay is too dry it can be a challenge centering it on the wheel because it doesn’t want to move. This proved to be the case with the porcelain, but eventually I was able to pull two cylinders successfully. The walls were even but the base was again on the heavier side. The third attempt with the porcelain was unsuccessful.
More rainbows were made, and I had to call it a day because I’d used up all the clay. After cleaning up the tools, wheel, and sink, I prepped the clay by making balls approximately 1.5 lbs. each so it would be ready to go the next time I practiced and hopefully both bags of clay would be neither too wet nor too dry!
Although it wasn’t the best studio day it was still good to practice. I always tell my students when they get frustrated or discourage that if it was easy everyone would do it! I had to remind myself that today as well. I also tell them to practice, practice, practice… and so I shall!
