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#51: What are the 3 levels to discovering your unique pottery voice?
27 Plays3 years ago
On this episode of Shaping Your Pottery we talk about the 3 levels to discovering your own unique voice in pottery
You will learn about the 3 levels and why it is important to know them
Level 1: Make it easy
Level 2: Discover
Level 3: Experiment
If you have quesitions about pottery send them to us on Instagram we would love to here from you @nictorres_pottery
For More episodes check out https://www.shapingyourpottery.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Finding Your Pottery Voice
00:00:00
Speaker
What is up, everybody? And welcome to Shaping Your Pottery. This is Nick Torres here. On this episode of Shaping Your Pottery, I'm going to be talking about the three levels of discovering your own voice with your pottery. If you love pottery and want to take your skills to the next level, you're in the right place. Find your own pottery style right here on Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. Let's get started.
Nick's Journey in Pottery Style Discovery
00:00:26
Speaker
Now, when I was about maybe in my second year of pottery, maybe going in the third, there were three things that I noticed that I did to kind of start discovering my own pottery style and my own voice with my pottery. And those three things were
00:00:47
Speaker
At first, I tried to make it my pottery as easy as possible. I tried to research what works for me because we all have different things that we like to go and work for us. The second thing that I did was I discovered what I like to call is discover. Discover is how I should say is you are trying to find the shape that you like, what you like to make and what you don't like to make.
The Three Levels: Easy Techniques, Discovery, Experimentation
00:01:13
Speaker
For example, maybe you don't like to make
00:01:15
Speaker
lot of bowls but you like to make a lot of bases. So you're discovering the shapes that you like with the discovery. Now the third level is like what I like to call experiment. Experimenting is just really trying new things out to try to make your pottery add a little bit of flair. Now why do these three levels are important? Why are they important? Well let's start with the first level. The first level is make it easy.
00:01:44
Speaker
Make it easy is really crucial for yourself because this is where you're going to find what works for you and what doesn't work for you because everybody is going to be different with their pottery. It doesn't matter what they are making. You could be using the same technique but things are not going to click like for some people. I'll give you a little bit of a story. So back when I was first learning pottery
00:02:09
Speaker
I was maybe a junior, I was probably like 16, 17 in high school. And my ceramics teacher, he taught us a certain way how to center our clay. We would use our left hand to brace the clay and then we would use a sponge and put it right at the edge of our wrist of our left hand.
00:02:28
Speaker
And while a lot of people had a lot of success with that, it just didn't click for me. It didn't click for me at all. And so the next year when I started making pottery again my senior year, I started looking for ways to make centering easier for me.
00:02:46
Speaker
because I knew that if I could find a way to make centering easier for me, I could have a lot more success later on. And instead of worrying so much about centering, I could focus more time on actually shaping and making things that I like.
Discovering Preferred Shapes and Styles
00:03:00
Speaker
So that is just an example of making things easy. It could be anything from centering to learning how to pull a different way. Sometimes you just need to switch up what you're doing in order to find what is going to make things easy.
00:03:16
Speaker
Now the second level is discovery. Discovery is literally just finding your shapes. When I was about my second third year going to third year, I was making a lot of mugs and a lot of mugs and I realized that I didn't like some shapes that I was making so I would throw them away.
00:03:40
Speaker
And during this time, I was literally just trying to find my shape that I like because that's the whole thing about powder. We have to find our shape that we like and we otherwise we're not gonna be able to enjoy what we're making. So I was just trying to make, trying to find my shape that I liked. And I realized that I didn't like skinny mugs because that just didn't look good to me.
00:04:06
Speaker
But what I did like was I like round mugs, really round mugs. And that transferred into my bases when I started making bigger vases. Because I still didn't like the skinnier vases, but I liked the round vases.
00:04:22
Speaker
And that's why we have to discover what we like and what we don't like because our shapes are really, really matter because that's where our style is going to start blooming a little bit. Because if we can't find our shape, then what is the point?
Experimentation and Unique Breakthroughs
00:04:38
Speaker
Now, this third level is probably the most important for you when you are discovering your own voice with your pottery to make it unique, make it stand out. And that is experiment.
00:04:50
Speaker
Experimenting is anything that you think could really improve your pottery or make it stand out a little bit. For example, a while back I got into raccoon firing and it was naked raccoon because I couldn't afford the actual raccoon glaze so I would use slip for my raccoon stuff.
00:05:15
Speaker
And during this, I liked the way how the naked Raku was coming out. I liked the different designs that were coming out with it. But I wanted to take it a little bit step further. So I had this idea in my head to make outlines of people. So for example, I did a Goku vase, Raku vase from Dragon Ball Z. And I just imprinted his picture, his silhouette onto my thing.
00:05:44
Speaker
And that gave me an idea. I just started experimenting with that and it actually came out really well. So when you are trying to experiment, that's where breakthroughs are going to happen. It's going to lead to discovering what you actually like and what is actually going to make your pottery stand out.
00:06:04
Speaker
that the third level is where we all want to be at. We all want to be at that experiment stage where we're trying different things, things that pop into our mind, because that's where literally that's where our voice is going to pop out from.
Conclusion and Q&A Invitation
00:06:18
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. Do you have questions about pottery that you'd like Nick to answer? Send them to us on Instagram at Nick Torres underscore pottery. We'll see you next time.