How to Form and Define in Pottery

Working with clay and creating pottery can be very relaxing, invigorating and the clay even softens your skin. Learning how to form and define pottery can give you a life long hobby to enjoy! Working with clay is a great stress reliever. But a big part of working with clay is learning to shape it, form it and feeling the form that begins to emerge from your hands. The easiest way to learn to feel the emerging forms and definitions of pottery, is to start with coiled pottery. This is actually the easiest and cheapest way of working with clay.Coiled pots are created by stacking and joining snakes of clay on top of each other. Then the coils are smoothed out, or not, depending on the effect that you want. What is really important is to make sure that the joints are strong and that the pot doesn’t crack when its fired.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• 4 lbs of clay
• Medium size piece of plastic sheet
• Clay scraper
• water

The following are the basic steps to forming the pottery.

1. Take a couple of pounds of clay. You need to knead the clay to be sure that you get all the bubbles out, because are bubbles are what cause the clay to crack. Throw your clay on a flat surface and knead it as you would bread dough. After a minute or so of kneading, throw it on the surface again, and knead some more. You will need to throw and knead for 5 to ten minutes. Then you want to check to see if you have air bubbles. Slice down the middle of your lump and if you see small spaces of holes like pebbles then there are still air pockets and you need to keep kneading until these no longer exist.
2. Roll out some coils first. Sort of like you used to work with play dough. You just make long sausage rolls, you want the rolls to be about 1 cm in diameter. You can even out the thicker sections by placing more pressure there. Place a plastic sheet over coils you make to keep them moist.
3. Make the base of the pot, by slicing a wedge of clay and forming it into a disk or shallow bowl of about 4 inches wide and a ½ inch thick. You can also use a pin roller to help you do this. With a clay scraper get rid of any bumps the base may have.
4. Take a coil and start coiling it up around the base. Start thinking about the shape you want to give it. If you want it to go straight up then make sure the coils are completely vertical. If you want it to bulge in areas then make the coils sit out just a little each time they go around the base. As you coil around the base you want to score the bottom of the coil so it joins well with the top coil. You can score with a wooden clay tool, or a table knife or fork, or some sort of utensil.
5. Go around the base a couple of times with the coil and then smooth the coils out with your fingers or with your clay tools to give the pot shape.
6. Don’t let your clay dry out. As you are working you will want to add a little water to your fingers to keep the clay soft and pliable and keep it from cracking.
7. Add another coil to the tapered end of the last one when a coil finishes.
8. Continue coiling and smoothing the coils until your pot reaches the height and shape you want.
9. Smooth out all the areas you want to and leave those you want to keep rough, if that’s what you want.

Tips & Warnings

• That’s all there is to forming and defining pottery. Your pot is ready to dry, and then go in for firing and then you can decorate and re-fire it again. This is actually a great way to relieve tension and anxiety and as you can see, you don’t really need a lot of equipment to start.