Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Shaping Your Pottery with Nick Torres, where we help you discover your own unique voice so you can stand out from the crowd and have more fun making pottery. So you make pottery that is truly amazing. What is up, everybody? It's Nick Torres here. And in this episode, I'm going to be telling you about documenting your work and coming up with new ideas and why it's important. When for a long while,
Speaker: I didn't really understand the power of documenting and writing down my ideas for my pottery. It just didn't, it never connected with me. I would see people like on Instagram, they would draw out forms before they would throw, and I didn't understand why they would do that. I always thought, why not just go in and just make the pottery so much faster than having to sit down, draw out the form, and then
Speaker: go and throw in the wheel that takes like another 15 minutes or so sometimes. And I didn't understand why they were doing that. But it wasn't until I had the interview with Marissa Childers. And basically, one of the things that stood out for me was that she documents her work, she always has like a notebook around with her. And she's always documenting so that she if an idea comes into her mind, then she writes it down.
Speaker: And when she said that, it kind of got me curious a little bit because I have never done that. And sometimes my pottery wouldn't look as good as I wanted it, or my ideas wouldn't really come out the way I wanted it. And because I wasn't doing that yet, I didn't understand it. And once I started doing it, I was like, wow, this is so awesome because
Speaker: this is actually helpful because I can write down ideas in my head and maybe at a later date, I can go back to it when I have the more resources or whatever. Lindsay Skipta said the same thing. She said that documenting your work and drawing it out is really, really helpful for later on because sometimes you don't have the resources for yourself, but it's good to have that idea written down so that you can look back at it later.
Speaker: Same thing with drawing out your pottery. So I had this idea for my pottery to make it look like an animal attack, kind of attacked it. And I wanted it to look like an animal attack. So I drew it out and I placed like three claws making it look like wolverine. And I placed three claw marks on there and I was just trying to think of ways that I can make it even better.
Speaker: And because I drew it out, it started, made it easier for myself when I was ready to start making it. And now I really love the idea of documenting work. It just really helps everything go a lot smoother and your voice, in my opinion, is gonna come from these ideas because you're writing it down and you are able to look back at it later. Because sometimes we think of an idea
Speaker: but we forget it. And then that's why it's important to document. There's this book called The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, I believe. And one of the concepts he explains in this book is that what gets managed gets measured. And that is super true in pottery. It's so true in everything, pretty much. What gets managed gets measured.
Speaker: And that's why it's so important to manage and document your pottery. This is what's going to lead you to discovering your voice later on the road. Because maybe you have an idea right now, but you don't have the resources or you don't have the skills yet to accomplish this yet. And then later down the road, when you have those resources and more skills, look back at those ideas and see what you can do. That's where your ideas are going to come to life. And that's where your voice is going to start to come now.
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.
