the most satisfying pottery technique

This is made with a technique called nerikomi and you can see here that it's on the inside but it's also all the way through onto the outside. So it's the clay itself that is making this pattern not the glaze. It's just transparent glaze. Now nerikomi is a very ancient technique. It originates in Japan and you can see some insane projects that people are doing on the internet. I'm not an expert and so I'm just going to be doing a very simple version of this technique so you can sort of get an idea how it works. So the most important thing is that you need two different colors of clay. So this is just a reclaim clay. When I do my reclaim I just mix all my clays together. I honestly don't remember anymore but it's possible I also added some iron to this clay. Now this is just a little bit lighter but it's probably again just a mixture of the clays and we're going to see if that can make a nice pattern. I'm just going to give this a wedge try and get rid of a little bit of the marbling so it's a more of a flat color. Okay so we're going to start out by making some thick ass slabs. I don't have wedging gauges that are very thick so I'm just going to use these two rolling pins four and a half centimeters thick. I'm thinking that's a little too thick. Do I have something else? Okay scratch that we're going to use some stacked thickness gauges. So I've just stacked up some random thicknesses so that each side is two and a half centimeters. And when you're rolling out your second one you want to try to make them the same shape if you can. That just means you're going to have less waste. Here comes the exciting part where we're going to attach them together. What you want to do is ideally have a scoring tool or a serrated rib or something like that because you need to score a pretty large surface area. I think even a serrated rib would be better than this because this is also quite small. We're not going to use any slip to attach these together because then you're going to start losing those crisp lines. It's fine you don't need slip as long as the clay is fairly wet still. So what you want to avoid is air bubbles. So I'm going to lay it on top and then I'm going to press from the middle and just go outward. And then to adhere them I find it helps to kind of slam them on the table a little bit. Okay so now we need to start changing the pattern a little bit here. So I'm going to take my knife cut it down the middle. See what we've got here so far. Okay it's like a hamburger. And then I'm going to lay these on top like so. Okay now I think is the time to start making the rough edges more straight so we can start mixing up the way we can put this together. Ta-da! And then we're going to do the same for the edges. So what I was talking before about waste pieces this is what I mean. So the more you line up your original slabs the less of this you're going to have to cut off. So now we have our perfect cake. This actually looks just like German cake that you get at a bakery. Now we're going to cut it like this. So you might be asking me Maya where does the distortion come in? You'll see later. Like right now I'm trying to be as precise as possible because I know it's going to get distorted later. I'm going to try and keep it as checkerboardy as I can now. Now you can see what I do here. I just flip it over. We got the beginnings of a checkerboard. You see this lineup is not perfect. That's fine. So as you're working to kind of blend the two pieces together I like to slam them on the table to even out the unevenness. Okay but don't blend with your finger like this especially between the two colors because that's going to make them blurry. There are people on the internet that are absolute Narikomi experts and they have probably a much more refined system than I have and you should definitely go check them out. I wanted to share with you guys my fast and hard way that I do Narikomi because maybe you guys are interested in it. So I just wanted to share it with you. This is very exciting. So this process is going to start the distortion. It's going to start looking a little psychedelic. That's fine. So slamming it like this also has the benefit of I'm making it longer this way and that's important because we need to cut it like this to bring that layer on top now. So I think what I'm going to go for this is four by four. I'm going to go by for eight by eight. So we have our Narikomi block here. Now we are just going to use some simple slab building techniques to make a plate. I guess we'll make a plate. Or should we make more of these? I'm just going to use my bisque molds. I've done loads of videos on these molds before so if you're interested in like this technique I will have some videos that are about that process linked down below. But this is a way that you can make some shapes and consistent shapes with slab building. Okay this part is always the most exciting part. So I'm just setting it to its lowest setting. I believe it's a centimeter. Yeah it's it's roughly a centimeter. What you need to do first is cut off the ends because the ends are always going to be a little bit wrinkly. So I'm just going to use this tool. I'm going to just drag it across. It's going to make a nice straight line. Amazing! This technique makes me so excited. So you can see where we're getting the distortion. But hang on because there's going to be a little bit more. Okay so I'm going to flip back over. So by the way if you don't have this tool, you absolutely don't need this tool, I'll try and find the link for this and post it down below in the description. But what you can do is take your thickness gauges, set them down, and then maybe I'll do I'll do the next one this way. Take your wire and what you want to do is push with your thumbs the wire into your thickness gauges and drag them along. It's a little bit more fiddly but it's totally possible and probably you can get really good at doing it this way. So I'm going to stick these against my body so they don't move. So that works too. So what I'm going to do is make a couple of these one centimeter thick slabs and then we'll go from there. This is the last one. This is just too thin at certain parts so it's going to make a hole. We could roll this out and use this for something or you just put it with the scraps. There's definitely a lot of scraps with this but of course you can wedge this up and you have a third clay that you can play around with. So I never mind mixing clays. I always use my clay. Don't be afraid to mix your clays as long as they have the same firing temperature they'll be just fine. So you can't mix like a porcelain with an earthenware. All of my clays are stoneware. I've done tests to make sure that they get along with each other but for the most part as long as they have the same firing temperature it's gonna be fine. Okay and then for these I usually make them half centimeter or sometimes a little bit thinner. I'll start with half centimeter and see if this rolls out to be a big enough piece because at the moment it's a little too small for these molds. Once again you'll notice that the distortion gets even more when you're rolling it out. So this is kind of like the last step of distortion. I don't know what to call this video. I'm probably just going to call it checkerboard but it's not a checkerboard clearly. It's like psychedelic checkerboard. I'm not sure how you can make a perfect checkerboard with this technique but the other one that I'm thinking of it's definitely not going to be perfect either but it will get a little closer. The only way to make a real checkerboard is with surface design techniques. So what you can do is do sgraffito or you can paint it on with glaze. These techniques like embedding the color into the clay is what I'm interested in but it's never going to be perfect. It's still a little bit too small for the mold here so I've reached my half centimeter so I'm just going to very slowly and carefully just roll it out a little bit more. So when you want to compress your slab but you don't want to smear it what you can do is lay some newspaper down on top of it and then compress through the newspaper. Transfer your slab to your mold if you're using a mold or you can of course use these slabs for slab building. Whatever you can use a slab for you can use these narrow foamy slabs for. Okay while that firms up I'm going to go on to the other bisque mold. They're all done now all I'm going to do is let them dry out. I'm going to bisque them, I'm going to glaze them transparent and I'll show you guys the results right now. So how cool are these narrow foamy plates? I'm so happy with how they turned out. One thing I just love about this technique is that the color pattern is infused into the clay. I think I'm going to call this like a psychedelic checkerboard because it's definitely not a true checkerboard but that's coming next week. Next week I've already decided I'm going to show you a second way to make a checkerboard pattern and that's going to be more of an actual checkerboard. Once I'm done filming the other checkerboard video I'll put a link up right here so definitely go check that out next if you're interested. Bye friends!