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This One Thing Will Help You Find Your Pottery Voice
74 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Nic Torres emphasizes the necessity of sticking with one pottery technique long enough to fully develop skills and exhaust all creative ideas before moving on. He addresses the common issue of boredom and suggests maintaining excitement by altering themes within the same technique, using personal anecdotes like his shift from creating ninja sculptures to astronaut figures, all while preserving his unique style. Guests like Eva Funderburk reinforce the value of revisiting and refining a technique to discover new possibilities.
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Transcript
The Power of One Technique
00:00:00
Speaker
What is up Shaping Nation? This episode I'm going to be talking about why you need to be sticking with one technique until you've exhausted all your ideas for your pottery. So you see, one of the biggest reasons why we can't find our own unique voice is because we keep hopping around from one thing to the next and we never stick long enough to something to make that idea be completely exhausted of all the ideas.
00:00:28
Speaker
You know, maybe you are somebody that likes to try different techniques and that is completely fine if you want to do that. But you have to stick with one technique long enough in order to build the skills necessary to have that skill set.
00:00:45
Speaker
You see, we don't just do something once and we're great at it. We have to do it multiple times until we are able to even start really seeing results.
Overcoming Boredom with Themes
00:00:55
Speaker
And that's why it's so important to focus on one technique that excites you. Focus on that one technique that excites you and keep doing that same technique or that same style over and over and over again until all the ideas have exhausted from your brain.
00:01:12
Speaker
Because it's going to become a point where you have done everything you can, you've thought of everything that you could possibly do to make this even better. And that's when you know, that's when you should start going another direction.
00:01:27
Speaker
But what what about boredom? Because the biggest thing why people change techniques so much is because of boredom. How do you get over that? So the way I like to get over boredom is by simply choosing things from my pottery. For example, for a while I was kind of like into this.
00:01:46
Speaker
ninja superhero sculpture people that I was making. But now I'm into making a lot of astronaut people. I don't know why I just like making astronauts. I call them Douglas James, by the way. And that's what I've been interested in. And that's how you but it's still the same technique. It's still the same process to the same style that I'm doing. All I did was change one thing and my technique and my style stay the same pretty much.
00:02:16
Speaker
And you can do the same exact thing. If you are getting bored very, very quickly, all you have to do is change a theme, change a style. So let's say you are somebody that makes graffiti style pots. And normally with his graffiti style pots, you maybe make some cartoonish looking characters.
00:02:35
Speaker
What if instead of making a cartoon character this time, what if you do a different theme and you do maybe mechanical robots for the theme? A theme is so important because this allows you to stick with one technique long enough, but it also still changes and gives you new ideas.
Finding Your Artistic Voice
00:02:55
Speaker
Because you have to stick with that one technique long enough otherwise you're never going to find your own unique voice.
00:03:01
Speaker
You have to do it until you exhausted all the ideas. And just because you're bored, doesn't mean you can't make something great out of it.
Insights from Eva Thunderberg and Nick Torres
00:03:09
Speaker
There's something that, when I interviewed Eva Thunderberg,
00:03:15
Speaker
And she told me that she likes to revisit Lord ideas or she likes to revisit the same technique over and over and over again until she really can't do anything about it. But every single time she does revisit that old technique, she gets something new out of it. So that's how you can continue sticking with the same idea.
00:03:37
Speaker
without getting bored and until you exhaust your ideas, then stick with the same technique. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and I'll see you guys in the next one.
00:03:47
Speaker
Hey thanks for listening to this episode of Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres. If you want to master the art of pottery and dive deeper into the techniques of the potters I interview, I created a newsletter that does just that. It dives deep into the techniques of the potters I interview. If you want to learn more, go to shapingyourpottery.com forward slash newsletter or click the link in the description to learn more.