Blog for TeachinArt online art school

How to center clay on the pottery wheel

3/9/2020

Centering of clay on the wheel is one of the most crucial parts of wheel throwing. This is the time to get the clay particles in the right place and to build on to the wedged clay process. If the clay is not centered correctly, then the pulling-up of the walls becomes a nightmare.

There are some potters who do not know that you can set the wheel to spin clockwise or anti-clockwise. Right handed potters should let the wheel spin anti-clockwise and left-handed throwers should switch the direction of the wheel head to a clockwise motion.

Throwing on the wheel is easier if you use technique instead of force. It is easier to get your arm locked on your upper leg and let you leg do the pushing and steadying instead of just your arms.

This is a video clip from the Understanding Porcelain e-course by Antoinette Badenhorst. TeachinArt brings ceramic workshops into the studio of potters around the world, and is the bridge between college students and hobby potters.

Other interesting links on our online school website:

Tags:
#centeringclay #wheelthrowing #potterytips #teachinart #wheelpottery #clayshares #ceramicschool #virtualclass

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How to prevent mug handle cracking

3/2/2020

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Nan RothwellNan Rothwell is a professional, functional potter from North Carolina who have 40+ years ceramics experience. She is the online instructor for the take your wheel throwing to the next level e-course at TeachinArt. She shares tips and techniques in her online class with potters and shows them how to move into advanced throwing with ease.

When you attach a handle to a mug, teapot, jug or any other clay wall, cracking of the handle is one of the big problems.

There are several reasons why handles crack loose, but this tip from Nan Rothwell may help you prevent some of your cracking reasons in the future.

Other links:
Learn pottery online (E-courses)
See our other demonstrations, tips & techniques
Preview e-courses

Tags:
#pottery tips #claymugs #ceramicschool #clayshares #teachinArt #makingmugs #teachingpottery

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Wedging clay using the bull's head or Ram's head technique

1/22/2020

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Antoinette Badenhorst explains how to do the bulls head wedging technique in her online workshop Understanding Porcelain. This is a video clip from her six weeks online class. It all starts with preparing the clay before your start with any wheel throwing or handbuilding projects.

Wedging clay is a hot topic to discuss among potters. Some believe that spiral wedging is the best way for preparing the clay, while others will not even think about moving away from the bull's head or ram's head wedging technique. Some ceramic artists even differ about the spelling of the wedging technique - is it bullshead, or maybe bull's head or even just bulls head - and the same argument is used for the ramshead method. Then we also have other techniques like slam wedging and there may be more, but we will discuss that later.

Most potters agree that proper wedging of clay is a very important part of any clay work. This is how you get rid of air bubbles in the clay, but it is also a way how to recycle old clay. Kneading is another term that is used often. Pushing clay through a de-airing pugmil is also considered as a way of wedging in modern times.

Some ceramic scholars learn that a chunk or block of clay is cut into two pieces with the shape of a wedge. The top one is lifted from the lower one, turned over and slammed onto the wedge that remained on the wedging table. This process is repeated until there are no more air pockets in the clay. The wedging process helps to get the clay uniform in plasticity, texture and color. Roughly 20 wedging's or kneading is enough to prepare the clay.

As long as you remove all the air pockets or anything that may mess up your wheel throwing or handbuilding process, then you should be safe to proceed.

In the picture on the left, coloring was used to show the movement of the particles during wedging. It may be an interesting and stimulating test for you to see what happens after 10, 20, 30 times and more of wedging your clay.

Other links:
How to do spiral wedging (David Voorhees)
How to center clay on the pottery wheel (Antoinette Badenhorst)
Demonstrations, tips & techniques
E-course (online workshops)

Tags:
#claywedging #wedgingclay #wedgeclay #potterytips #teachinart

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Trimming tips for porcelain by Antoinette Badenhorst

1/6/2020

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When is the right time to use blunt tools and when should you use sharp trimming tools? How dry should the pot be before you can start with the trimming? When is the best time in the drying stage to start with the trimming process? Is there a right and wrong way for trimming on the wheel? Which is the best trimming tool? How to trim a foot rim? How to trim porcelain?

All of these are valid questions by potters and these problems are all addressed in the online workshops at TeachinArt, the online art school where potters can see close-up demonstrations of each process and can learn the best techniques in the comfort of their own place and own time.

Links:
E-courses (online workshops)
Demonstrations, tips & techniques
Preview E-courses
Our Art Instructors

Tags:
#trimmingclay #wheeltrimming #trimmingtools #trimmingclay #teachinart #trimmingtips #potterytools

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Tips: Pinching clay

12/30/2019

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Pinching clay is one of the underestimated techniques among potters. Many believe that pinching is just for beginners, but if you master pinching skills, then you can use this even when you are working on the potters wheel.
There are challenges with pinching and sometimes a pinch pot gets completely out of control. This video shows an easy way of how to do in-pinching to get the pinch pot back under your control.

With pinching, you can develop "eyeballs on your fingers", as Antoinette always tells her students. Clay pinching skills will help you to judge the thickness of a wall or a bottom on a pot - helping you with trimming.

Antoinette Badenhorst presents an online workshop where she teaches potters how to pinch a complete functional teapot with clay (Pinching teapots for Beginners).

Links:
E-courses (online workshops)
Preview E-courses
Demonstrations, tips & techniques

Tags:
#Antoinetteporcelain #teachinart #pinchingclay #pinchingpottery #pinchingbowls #potteryclasses #potteryworkshops #teachingartist #Mississippiartist #handbuildpottery #ceramicschool #learnpottery #teachingceramics

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Tips: How to use balloons for translucent handmade porcelain bowls

10/21/2019

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Sculpting with porcelain is possible if you understand the character of the clay. Antoinette Badenhorst, ceramic artist from Mississippi uses different techniques to build her porcelain sculptures. Balloons are one of the techniques.

She demonstrates in this video how to use a balloon to make a translucent porcelain bowl that can be used as part of a bigger handmade project. She shows in the video that the balloon shaped bowl may also be used as part of a porcelain dinner set. The size and shape of the balloon will dictate the size and shape of the bowl.

Links:
E-courses (online workshops)
Preview E-courses
Demonstrations, tips & techniques

Our Art Instructors
Understanding Porcelain
Porcelain handbuilding

Tags:
#sculptingclay #translucentporcelain #ceramicschool #porcelainsculptures #claysculptures #potterytips #teachinart

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Coloring and weaving of wool in the Rockies

10/5/2019

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Catto Center at Toklat in the Rocky mountains

Toklat, meaning “headwaters,” was built as a wilderness lodge and family home by Stuart Mace and his wife Isabel in 1948. Located near the headwaters of Castle Creek near Aspen in the Rocky Mountains, this serves now as a gathering place for cultural and ecological discourse.

With the help of Jessica Hobby Catto and her husband Henry, ACES (Aspen Center for Environmental Studies) bought Toklat in 2004 to preserve Stuart’s legacy.

Elena Gonzalez Ruiz, a native of Oaxaca in Mexico, and her family have been part of the Catto Center at Toklat even before it became an ACES' site.

She has been a long-standing Artist-in-Residence at the Center, traveling back to the Castle Creek valley each summer. Elena contributes to ACES’ mission by providing educational opportunities related to traditional and environmentally-responsible textile production.

According to Elena, they have about 7,000 people in her village with about 4,000 weavers. Most of the coloring and dyeing ingredients like the indigo plant are grown by her people. They count the minutes that the yarn is kept in the coloring bucket to get the colors needed for the individual carpets, handbags and other wool projects.

Links:
E-courses (online workshops) at TeachinArt
Demonstrations (Tips shared by teachers of TeachinArt)
Preview e-courses (take a quick peek into our online workshops)
Art Instructors (Meet our online art instructors)

Tags:
#weaving #coloringwool #naturalcoloring #aspen #coloradoartists #Rockymountains #cattocenter #ACES

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Wood firing kilns and processes

9/30/2019

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David in his wood fire kiln

Many potters dream about having their own wood fired kiln, but what exactly goes on behind the scenes. We asked David Voorhees, one of our online teachers who has his own wood fire kiln in North Carolina to answer some of the most common questions about wood firing.

How long does it take to fire the kiln?
How long does it take to pack and unpack the kiln?
How much wood do you use?
How long do you normally fire the kiln?

Every wood-fired kiln is different as they are all site built and of varying dimensions. Firing lengths can vary for effect as well with many potters reaching cone 10 or 2300F then holding it there for a day or more to accumulate melting wood ash. My kiln is pretty straight forward with a rise to cone 10, then spraying a few pounds of soda ash solution followed by slowly shutting it down as the last of the firebox wood gets consumed. My kiln holds about 250 pots and takes 26-28 hours to fire and 3 days to cool down. I usually have 3 to 6 potters join me with a few pots and some firing duties. Since it also a car kiln it is easy to load taking only two to three hours to load and get started. Unloading takes less than an hour. I try to fire 4 times a year using about 1 1/2 cords of sawmill scrap wood for each firing. Wood preparation is a big job requiring helpers. Plentiful seasoned and dry wood is a must. Wood firing is an amazing community building effort and quite different from much studio pottery work time alone in a studio. To help with that aspect I have incorporated a pizza oven into the kiln design. When the firing is done, we make and eat pizzas! Hard work but very rewarding.

Before the firing

After the firing

The trolley just after pulling it out. Note the twist bottle leaning with the brown topped jar; these two fused together during the firing. The jar was on the trolley near the center post with drip, the twist bottle was on the bag wall and they got too close, fusing up. To extricate them without losing other pots I had to reach in through a 6" gap, using my iPhone to "see" what was going on. I then removed smaller pots through the gap and made room to move larger pots off of the top kiln shelf so I could lift up the fused pair onto the shelf where they now sit. Fortunately, the only pot lost was the twist bottle which gave up a chunk when pulled from the jar. A small price for an important lesson with car kilns: leave lots of clearance!

David presents a 6 weeks online workshop at TeachinArt (porcelain tips for wheel pottery).

He shows potters how to push the limits of porcelain and demonstrates the easy way to get the best out of wheel throwing.

Interesting books about wood firing.

The art of firing by Nils Lou
Wood-fired stoneware and porcelain by Jack Troy
The kiln book by Frederick L. Olsen (here you find diagrams and instruction on how to build different anagama kilns)

David in the TeachinArt studio during the recording of his online workshop

Links:
E-courses at TeachinArt
Our Art Instructors
Preview e-courses
Demonstrations and tips

Tags:
#woodfiring #naturalfiring #teachingpottery #learnpottery #nortcarolinapotters

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How to make your own plaster bat for the pottery wheel

9/30/2019

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Antoinette Badenhorst and David Voorhees, both professional potters and teachers at TeachinArt show how to make plaster wheel bats for the pottery wheel. This demonstration was presented during the recording of David's e-course Porcelain Tips For Wheel Pottery at the studio of Antoinette in Saltillo Mississippi.

Mima Boskov from South Africa plaster bats

Mima Boskov is a South African potter who completed the Understanding Porcelain e-course of Antoinette Badenhorst at Teachinart.
She learned in the online workshop how to make a plaster bat for her pottery wheel and then she decided to create her own version of the plaster bat. That is why TeachinArt is a platform for Artists who teach Artists. Mima is a typical example of one of the success stories of online teaching.

Here is Mima's explanation in her own words.

I took up pottery a few years ago, in an attempt to discover my Creative Self, liberate the Inner Child, find the Artist Within - ah, you've heard it all before: mid-life crisis and how to solve it...

I've been wedging, throwing, despairing, buying books, Googling and reading articles with genuine passion ever since.

I'm still waiting for the Artist, but I've revealed a determined Artisan Within, and sure have hatched an Inner Gyro Gearloose (for the younger among us, that's the whacky inventor from Donald Duck cartoons). The hatchling grew out of my frustration with relatively poor choice of pottery tools in South Africa: no Mudtools, no Griffin Grip, no Strongarm centering tool, no plaster bat mold systems... So many tempting goodies that one can glimpse on internet pages, but can't source locally. Ordering online involves shipping and import duties, and the price becomes extravagant.

There is an Afrikaans saying in my country: "'n Boer maak 'n plan".

It literally means "the farmer makes a plan", but is used when lateral thinking helps one find a novel and ingenious way of surmounting an obstacle.

I realized that being the Boer with 'n plan and making my own pottery tools gives me almost as much pleasure and sense of achievement as making pots.

We needed plaster bats for the Understanding Porcelain course. I had been trying to develop a plaster bat system for my wheel for a while, and a detail from Antoinette's drawing made everything click together.

Mima Boskov is a South African potter who completed the Understanding Porcelain e-course of Antoinette Badenhorst at Teachinart.
She learned in the online workshop how to make a plaster bat for her pottery wheel and then she decided to create her own version of the plaster bat. That is why TeachinArt is a platform for Artists who teach Artists. Mima is a typical example of one of the success stories of online teaching.

Here is Mima's explanation in her own words.

I took up pottery a few years ago, in an attempt to discover my Creative Self, liberate the Inner Child, find the Artist Within - ah, you've heard it all before: mid-life crisis and how to solve it...

I've been wedging, throwing, despairing, buying books, Googling and reading articles with genuine passion ever since.

I'm still waiting for the Artist, but I've revealed a determined Artisan Within, and sure have hatched an Inner Gyro Gearloose (for the younger among us, that's the whacky inventor from Donald Duck cartoons). The hatchling grew out of my frustration with relatively poor choice of pottery tools in South Africa: no Mudtools, no Griffin Grip, no Strongarm centering tool, no plaster bat mold systems... So many tempting goodies that one can glimpse on internet pages, but can't source locally. Ordering online involves shipping and import duties, and the price becomes extravagant.

There is an Afrikaans saying in my country: 'n Boer maak 'n plan.

It literally means "the farmer makes a plan", but is used when lateral thinking helps one find a novel and ingenious way of surmounting an obstacle.

I realized that being the Boer with 'n plan and making my own pottery tools gives me almost as much pleasure and sense of achievement as making pots.

We needed plaster bats for the Understanding Porcelain course. I had been trying to develop a plaster bat system for my wheel for a while, and a detail from Antoinette's drawing made everything click together.

Rubber grommet

For my plaster bats, I used two pieces of dowel (10 mm diameter dowel - matching the diameter of wheel pins - cut to 15 mm length), and a lucky find from a hardware store, electrical department, called "rubber grommet". I have no clue what is it actually meant to be used for, but I browse hardware stores with enthusiasm that normal females reserve for shoe shops, always on a lookout for useful parts for my various projects.

Dowels with the rubber grommet

Before assembling it, I attached a clay coil to the edge of plastic bat, and built it into a thin wall (that came from Antoinette's drawing). Sunlight dishwashing liquid is a good mold release

I inserted wooden dowels in the plastic bat holes, and put grommets on them. For my 25 cm plastic bat, I used 500 ml of water, and as much plaster as water would hold, and poured it on the bat.

After half an hour, the clay wall can be taken off, and the plaster smoothed out with a metal ruler. The sides can be tidied up with a Sureform blade and green scouring pad.

In another half hour, plaster can be taken off the plastic bat, using a thin spatula. After removing the dowels, the rubber grommets stay safely embedded in the underside of the bat, so the whole thing can be attached to the wheel head pins, and reused many times without damaging the plaster. A thin rubber mat on the wheel head helps secure the bat

Links:
E-courses at TeachinArt
Art instructors at TeachinArt
Preview e-course
Demonstrations & tips

Tags:
#potterywheel #wheelthrowing #wheelbats #teachinart #teachingpottery #ceramicschool #teachingpottery

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Tips for cutting wood segments

9/28/2019

7 Comments

Bob Rundquist is a woodworking artist from Saltillo in Mississippi who presents an online workshop (Introduction to segmenting) where he demonstrates how to do closed segmenting. This segmenting class is for beginners, but seasoned woodworkers may get several handy tips from this virtual class.

The golden rule of woodworking: "Measure twice, cut once".

Cutting wood for lovely wood segmented projects is not just about measuring, but safety for the woodworker as well. The smaller the segments, the more dangerous to cut. When you work with precious wood and/or colorful expensive wood, then you do not want to waste any of the wood. That brings the question of what to use for cutting the wood.

The table saw can be your biggest friend if you know how to get zero clearance when cutting segments. Accidents do happen, but you can minimize the possibilities if you follow the advice of Bob Rundquist in this video.
When you work with any power tools, be on the alert the whole time. Accidents happen easily when you do not pay attention.

Links:
E-courses at TeachinArt
Tips and demonstrations
Introduction to segmenting

Tags:
#cuttingwood #woodsegments #segmenting #woodworkers #woodworking #woodworkingtips #safecutting

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Understand pottery glazing

9/28/2019

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Antoinette Badenhorst explains with kitchen ingredients what happens in the pottery kiln with the ceramic glazes that potters use on their ceramic items. Colors that you normally see on the pot before it is fired is not necessarily the color that you will see when the pot is fired.

Links:
Demonstrations, tips & techniques for ceramic artists
E-courses at TeachinArt
Glazing made easy e-course with Antoinette
Shino glazing with Connie Christensen
Our Art Instructors

Tags:
#potteryglazes #ceramicglazes #glazingpottery #understandglazes #ceramicschool #teachinArt

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Throwing, carving and altering porcelain

9/5/2019

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One of TeachinArt online teachers, Antoinette Badenhorst presented a hands-on workshop at the Pottery Studio in Bryanston South Africa where she demonstrated the carving and altering process of porcelain.

She calls porcelain the "Diva of clay" and tells her students that they have to understand the character of the clay to really push it to it's limits.

Wheel thrown porcelain bowl, carved and altered, and then spray painted with Antoinette's own glazes.

Here are some of the characteristics of porcelain.

When fired correctly, porcelain has a glass like or marble appearance.
Porcelain has a weak green strength and should therefore be handled with the utmost care before the firing process.
Porcelain becomes very pyro-plastic (soft because of the heat) at a high temperature. Any thinner parts will collapse when pulled down by the weight of the heavier or thicker parts. It will easily warp or slump during firing. Potters will often times create ways to support a porcelain piece during the firing process to prevent deformation or make sure that the construction is very evenly done and well designed.

Links:
Understanding porcelain e-course with Antoinette Badenhorst
Porcelain handbuilding online workshop with Antoinette Badenhorst
E-courses (online classes) at TeachinArt
Demonstrations, tips and techniques
Preview e-courses

Tags:
#teachinart #wheelthrowing #teachingartist #carvingporcelain #alteringporcelain #porcelainplatter #divaofclay #ceramicschool #clayshares

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How to center clay on the pottery wheel

How to prevent mug handle cracking

Wedging clay using the bull's head or Ram's head technique

Trimming tips for porcelain by Antoinette Badenhorst

Tips: Pinching clay

Tips: How to use balloons for translucent handmade porcelain bowls

Coloring and weaving of wool in the Rockies

Catto Center at Toklat in the Rocky mountains

Wood firing kilns and processes

How to make your own plaster bat for the pottery wheel

Mima Boskov from South Africa plaster bats

Tips for cutting wood segments

Understand pottery glazing

Throwing, carving and altering porcelain

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​Catto Center at Toklat in the Rocky mountains

Mima Boskov from South Africa plaster bats

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Archives

Links to other pages

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Catto Center at Toklat in the Rocky mountains