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Scaling Your Pottery: A Path to Improved Skills
188 Plays4 months ago
In this episode, Nic Torres explores the benefits of scaling your pottery up or down to enhance your skills. He shares insights from his own experience, where making tiny sculptures revealed gaps in his technique for larger pieces. Nic explains that beginners should start with smaller projects to learn the basics before attempting larger ones. He emphasizes the importance of scaling in both hand-building and wheel-throwing pottery to identify areas for improvement. Additionally, Nic provides tips for centering pots on a wheel
Get your 53 themes by clicking this link shapingyourpottery.com/53themes
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Transcript
Introduction to Scaling Pottery
00:00:00
Speaker
Should you scale your pottery up or should you scale your pottery down? And what is the difference and why should you do either of these things? What is up, shape nation? This is Nick Torres here, and in this episode, I'm gonna give you a simple exercise that you can do to start making better pottery or start making your ideas come to life. So the very simple exercise is simply scaling your pottery up or scaling your pottery down. Either one works fine, but it kind of depends on what you're doing.
Discovering the Benefits of Scaling
00:00:29
Speaker
So you see, I found out this, doing this completely by accident.
00:00:33
Speaker
So you see for a very long while I was making a lot of very tiny sculptures and I could turn them into magnets and very recently I just started decided to start making larger sculptures. I started to make larger sculptures because I just thought I would try it and I tried it out and I thought it was very fun.
Challenges of Scaling Up in Pottery
00:00:51
Speaker
And when I tried making these larger like sculpture heads, What I noticed was is that I'm actually lacking a lot in my sculpture skills because for so long I focused on making tiny things with not a lot of facial features, like I didn't have mouths and sometimes I wouldn't even have eyes, and I didn't even have ears or hair.
00:01:13
Speaker
And because I'd only focus on like making a hood or making like a mask, I didn't have to focus on making mouth or I didn't have to focus on making a hood or, you know, a and an ear or a nose because I didn't have to, I didn't have to worry about it. They were covered up. The only thing I really had to worry about was the eyes. And when I started doing these larger sculptures, I realized I was very lacking in certain techniques that actually make the facial features come about. And I wanna have learned that if I didn't scale up my pottery, didn't scale up my sculptures, right? And the same thing applies for wheel throwing. A lot of us, we wanna jump into throwing very large pots. But the thing is, if you are a beginner, you are going to struggle so much if you just jump right into throwing larger pots. You're gonna struggle so much because you don't know the right technique. So in that case, instead of trying to throw big,
00:02:11
Speaker
You wanna throw smaller, like, you know, throw like one, two pounds of clay, throw smaller so you can actually learn the right techniques to throw in large. And by the way, it all comes down to centering, how you center your pots. That's just an outside, an extra tip for any wheel throwers, just how you center your pots will make a big difference in throwing large.
Techniques for Scaling Pottery
00:02:33
Speaker
But if you are looking to do a certain thing or looking to improve your pottery skills, Think about how you could scale up your pottery so you can use it as practice or scale down your pottery as well to use that as practice. If you are somebody that hand builds, you might want to think about scaling up your pottery. Scaling up your pottery so you can see what needs to be done. See what needs to be done in what steps, what you need to what you can improve on, what you can what things you need to do to make the best possible pot that you can. And then once you get comfortable with that large,
00:03:08
Speaker
that large pot that you're making or that small pot that you're making, then you could either scale it back down or scale it back up. Right. Like I mentioned earlier, for the longest time, I was making a lot of tiny sculptures. And that skill helped me enough where I was able to make larger sculptures. And they were very tiny. But now that I'm making larger sculptures, Because I scaled up, I noticed the things that I have I'm missing. So scaling up and scaling down can definitely help you with your potter. Remember, if you are somebody that is making hand building or your sculpture, scaling up is a great way to notice the details that you need to work on. And if you are a wheel thrower, scale down first before you can you can start making larger pots. i Hope you guys enjoy this episode and I'll see you guys in the next one. Thanks for listening to this episode of shaping your pottery.
Finding Themes in Pottery
00:04:00
Speaker
If you are struggling with finding your own theme for your pottery so that you know you are known for something, I put together 53 themes that you can use and you can take. All you have to do is go to shapingyourpottery.com forward slash 53 themes. That's five, three themes to get these 53 themes. It's really important for you to find a theme for your pottery so that you're not gonna get, you can have multiple styles with your pottery and you can be known for something. So again, go to shapingyourpottery.com forward slash 53 themes, that's five, three themes to get these 53 themes. Thanks guys, I'll see you guys next time.