Breaching Whale Jars.

Good morning, it's December 12th today. So I'm recording this and I'm going to post it, I think, around Christmas. I already have one posted for the end of the year. So it's going to be small, tiny sugar balls and I just took a commission as a Christmas present. This is going to be pressure. Yeah, I hate taking orders this time of the year, but he's local so I don't have to ship it. And he wants a little sugar ball and he wants a handle that's a whale tail. So I thought, well, it's an object that probably would sell fairly well in this area, except I'm a bit worried about making a whale tail because, you know, in essence it needs to be a statement and yet that would be so big as a handle on top of a lidded sugar jar. So we'll try it. And I wanted to say a big thank you because I have this book that I leave out in the summer for people to sign in from the YouTube channel and it's best pack. I mean, a lot of people came to visit this year and I can't read everybody in here because they're Lea and Jenica. It could have taken me 10 minutes. So, but anyway, and you'd all fall asleep and you'd have to go for more coffee. But anyway, thank you everybody who came to visit from all over the place. And, you know, Europe, Asia and North America, of course. So I don't think I saw anybody from South America though, but we did see some from Japan. So, so anyway, thank you very much for coming and I hope you enjoyed your holiday because it's not just to see me here. There's so much in Nova Scotia. It's a beautiful province. And of course we're right on the water so you can go whale watching and lighthouse route if you just want to look at all the lighthouses in Nova Scotia, which are, you know, they're decommissioned. That's kind of sad because we don't hear the boom anymore because they all have GPS. So this bat system, which I am going to be using again, is from Bill Wright. There's this little drive bat and let's turn the wheel on. And basically the drive bat fits right on the pins that are normal on every wheel. And then you just have to, I used to try cleaning these up as I take the pots off from the previous time. So you just attach it, put it on and then and when you lift it off, you don't distort it at all because it's on this tiny little bat. So I really started throwing on these a lot and they come in all sorts of sizes. These are perfect for plates, a little small sandwich plate. But this is for the bowl and this is for the lid. And I'm thinking the lid will actually have the flange on it. And this will just be a ball, but I'm going to try it both ways to see what is the best way of doing it. So I don't bother rounding my balls off because I have enough muscle power to actually centre this. And if I wanted to, I could put my elbow against this wall here and that really stops my arm from swinging backwards and forwards. It'll still do this, but it won't go forward and back because the wall stops it. So that's a good idea if you can build yourself an extra solid wall, a little support system there. So centering. If you want to watch how to centre and do beginning throwing, I have a whole program of 10 videos on doing some basic throwing. I think it was posted about two years ago. You can see it on my YouTube videos. People ask how to get to all my videos. They watch one. And all you have to do is click on the little subscribe button on the video. It takes you to my homepage and then look down and it shows videos for all the videos that I've ever done. Okay. That took a while. I have two heating systems in this studio. One is a ceiling, like a garage heater, which is the one that just turned on, which it rarely turns on unless the other one allows the temperature to go below the thermostat, which is like a wood stove, gas stove. But the pilot had blown out because we had a lot of wind last night. We have a little snow flurry going on at the moment, but we had high wind and so a pilot blows out on my regular wood stove looking gas heater. And then of course the garage heater kicks in as a backup, which is nice to have in a studio where it's cold. A backup system. So I'm just, the first time I throw something, not the first time completely, but this is the first time in this session, I, I'm basically just trying to see how much my clay will give me without forcing it, you know? So, um, I don't want to make it too thin to get to a certain size. So I'll leave it middle in size. That way when I'm throwing other pieces or lids, I can actually scratch it a bit more, or maybe not enough, or not as much, depending. But I'm going to measure these so I can get them all pretty close in size. And because I don't do that much trimming, and, um, that from the last time I drew, that would have dented the pot. See, I'm basically throwing out now with my middle finger on my left hand to push against the wooden rib, just to give it a little bit of a curve, so it's a nicer shape. And that will be my prototype to see whether I can get them all to be that size. The first two or three I measure, because I'm just getting my eyes sort of established for the actual sizing, because after that I'll be able to tell I'm pretty close within a quarter inch when I'm getting them the right size. So I'll measure it for the inside. There we go. That's a tight measurement. Let's see if it's the same this way around. Yeah, that's pretty good. It's a little, just a little tiny, maybe a sixteenth of an inch loose. Like I said, these things are just so cool. A screwdriver or a wooden rib. I broke a wooden one so I like to use the metal screwdriver, flathead screwdriver. And that's my base where I now have to make a lid. So let's see if I can get a lid from the piece of clay. This is a slightly smaller bat. I only have a couple of this size Bill sent me to try it, and I found it a bit too small, but for a little lid it will be fine. My mug is almost as wide as that, and I wanted more distance there. But if you get them, and you can learn, it's just that my hand was, when I was centering, was falling off the edge there. So I like them a little wider, so when I'm centering the mug, which I needed my hand to be a little inside, that was too narrow. So I usually end up doing it like there, and then that was just putting me off. Okay, so we have a tiny little piece of clay. It's about half the size of the jar itself. When you first buy these bats, they're brand new, and they have almost an oily film on the surface, because it's brand new from the factory, I guess. The sheets are just made like any plastic laminate would be made, I suppose. So they take a little wearing in. Usually you throw one pot on, and you can't get the clay to stick very easily, so you have to really force it. But if you just lightly used a piece of maybe the finest 400 grit emery paper, like a 400 grit sandpaper, and just hit it with like one or two seconds, and it would be enough to sort of just give it a bit of a tooth on the surface, and then the clay sticks really easy. So that's a tip when you first get them. We used to call it wet and dry sandpaper. Now, I've got to make a lip, so that's why I want to make sure this clay isn't too little. I'm going to leave a really thick top edge, because I better get the rim. I don't want to thin it too much before I put the rim down, otherwise it will collapse with the pressure. And then I simply get... There's a couple of ways of doing it. You can use the rib if you've got enough strength in the clay. You can use this corner of this rib here, just to kind of go up about halfway, and put some pressure on, push down and in, and you end up making this instant lip. That's my favorite way of doing it. Another way is to use a pin and push down, and maybe I'll try showing you one of those as well, but this is the way I do it by default. But you can't do it if the clay is made really thin, because it makes it collapse. That's a bit small at the moment, but I'll give it a measure just to show you what I got, and then we'll open it up a bit more. Clean it up, because I don't need it to be wet anymore. All right, so how much do I need to stretch down? Quite a lot. So I'm going to use the rib to support it, making sure I don't catch it on Remember not to go too far, because it's not easy to take it back. So my eyes were so a lot off, so we're much closer now from the first thing. So next time I do it, I know I just got to start with it being much wider. I wanted it to be a bit flatter anyway, that's kind of a dome. Let's see what we've got now. Perfect. There you go. So that gives me an overhang quite a lot, and a little bit of slack in the center, so that when the drying happens, sometimes these pieces lift up quite a bit. And same with the bowl, the shrinkage sometimes changes the measurement, so I don't like to make it too tight, because I tend to think that the actual lid gets too tight after it's dried. I have a slight dome in this, and I don't want them totally flat, because I've got this whale tail. I need the lid to feel like it's lifting the tail and coming up. Oh boy, I could make some really cool ones of these if I wanted to put a lot of money into it. But you know, carving waves in the lid, I'm going to use my chattering tools to create a wave texture anyway. Anyway, I'll give it one more measure just to make sure. It's a bit almost touching now. Okay, so that's what I'm going to do. So this, when it's upside down, I don't think I should try doing that, but can I do that? Oh yes, I can. Okay, it's freshly thrown around, I don't want it to distort, but this will fit on top of there. And I'm not going to do it now, because the clay is really soft, but then I'll have a whale tail on it. So can we turn it the right way up? Ta-da! Isn't this cool, this bat system? It's so nice, you can just do a lot of stuff with it. Okay, the next step, while the lids and the jaws are drying, is I'm just going to make some little whale tails. This clay's a little dry, but just kind of do it by rolling a ball in your hand and then rolling it into a little sausage, flatten the bottom, and then I like to put a little backbone in the whale, just to be hard for you to see, but basically I'm just pinching, finger to thumb, and it gives you that kind of feeling of a spine. Keeping that accentuated a little bit, just with a modelling tool, and simply pulling it up, pushing down, and it forms a little ridge bone. And then I pinch it again, just to kind of make it irregular a little bit. You can't really see that. I'm just pinching my finger and thumb together like that, and what I did was I ran this on the spine, just to give it a bit more, you know, kind of up and down with a knife, but I can do that later when it's leather hard, I can just take a little bit off in places, just to make it look like it's leather even. So that's the bottom, and that bit will sit there like that, and then another little bit of clay, just make it into a little tiny thin coil with a narrow point of each end, and then you bend it, can you see that? Yep, bend it, so it makes a little crescent moon, and then I'm flattening it, and the clay is all sitting on a varnished piece of wood, so it's a good idea to lift it every couple minutes, place it in a different place where it doesn't stick to the table, and if you put it over a dusty area, that's even better. So I'm pushing down and pulling, so I'm trying to do it even so it's symmetrical, lift it up, turn it over, and then I take a notch, like this, in the middle there, just take a little notch out, so I just made that so it defines the shape of each fin, whatever that for, of the tail. So I've got like a basic thing, make sure that point is just a little bit more pointy, which I hate in a sense because that's the bit that'll get broken first if somebody's using this and they're not careful, but I also like to just wet it, smooth it out a little bit, turn it over so it's not sticking to the table. You can do it on paper, then you don't have to worry about it sticking, I'm going to grab this, my table's a bit dusty, so, and you've got this little shape, and then I pinch it right opposite that little V, so you've got this little pinched area, and then the tail, using a little cheese cutter, I cut down in the middle, open it up, just a touch of water, not too much, you don't want to make it slippery so the piece doesn't stick, but just enough water in there so it's like a little mouth, and then I stick it right in there, and just wiggle it a bit so the water isn't smudged into the clay from either side, and then use a modelling tool, I like the back of this paintbrush, I use it for a lot of different things, and then just smudge the clay in, just pull that back a bit, smudging it in, turn it over, so you've got to get rid of that little joint area, and it's solidly mixed in, but if you made it really wet, the clay wouldn't just be slippery, but it's just enough water to make it tacky, so you just try not to add too much water any time, because if you do, it just gets really muddy and slippery, and then the paintbrush just to clean it up, all right, and we got it, so if you want this little spine thing, you can simply use a paintbrush if you want, just to kind of give it a wiggle, and that's the whale tail that will sit on the lid, I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 now, so I've got to do another three, and all I did was get a block of clay like that, cut down, and this I divided into three, so I've got three little blocks, which is how many I need, take off a bit at the end for the tail, and then round this into a ball, just a ball, and make it into a cone, and then we do the same over again, and that's how we kind of make a whale tail, the next thing to do, you have to cut through these, and I love my little harps that I've shown in videos before, with a thin guitar string, because you barely leave anything on the surface of the actual bat that you're cutting off, it's a very thin piece of clay there, as you can see, almost nothing, you can see through and then we turn it the right way up, and I've got this one ready, and I'm going to basically stick the whale on this, now I'm going to trim a little bit off this, but in the past I've actually used that to some effect, to actually be like the splash of the wave, so let's try it both ways, so what I do is I wet it, you can still trim with the whale attached, so basically rule of thumb for me, when I'm working with clay, is if my piece is less than an inch thick, I actually don't hollow it out, because I can fire the kiln slowly, thoroughly dry the pieces first, and you don't have to worry about, you know, pieces blowing up, but when they get thicker than that, you've got to be really careful, and because this is fairly, this is, it's now 340, I started doing these after lunch, so they're not that old, anyway, we're going to stick it down by just moving it, until you feel like you've got some real resistance to the movement, and now it's stuck, I mean I have to clean it up, let's move this one out a little bit, get a bit closer, a couple of little wooden modelling tools, I want to make sure it's stuck before I do anything else, but basically just pushing down the clay from the actual piece, I want it to look like it's splashing out of the water, so I don't want it to look like it's completely flush, or you know, moulded out of the water vessel itself, trying to give you a feeling of a splash, okay, so we know that that's stuck, give it some movement, like diving, just bending it over, and now this is what I was saying, with a paintbrush, without it getting too wet, so not too much water here, you can start playing with that little piece of clay that we've got, instead of trimming it off, and this actually hides, I'll just bring it up a little bit, 3 30, boy the day went by fast, using the end of the paintbrush now, I'm going to try to really kind of give some feeling of the splash thing, using the ferro, I've glued, duct taped this brush together so many times, because I really like it, and now we've got it getting much higher up on the body of the actual piece, and now I'm going to get some water in my paintbrush, maybe I need a slightly thinner one, but I want to create that feeling of the splash, just to kind of, now we've got the water, the feel of it, so now I'm going to start flicking it out a bit, oh we've got a nice little effect just there, and then just kind of, we're building that, that movement, it looks great, it's a nice way of doing it, so use, instead of trimming, use the piece of clay there, okay, maybe some close-up now, because that still, the whale looks like he's really going underneath the water, and now I can do some chattering on this with a tool, but I've got to be very careful because of that tail there, so that's just part of the thing, so it'd be nice if I can give a little texture to this smooth area here, and I've thought about doing that first, and then doing this part to it afterwards, but you know, you can do it, you just have to be careful, and then you want to make some movement on the tail too, we can curl that up a little bit there, we can pull this one a little down this way, so we've even got some nice movement, all right, that's how to make a whale tail, so I got 16, I've got 15 more to go, you could do a little coil around here if you wanted, put some time into it, I'll show you that, but you're starting to add time to a piece, you've got to charge more, and how much is something worth, and what will somebody do, but if you do, you just kind of wet the area first, I think this might be enough, good guess, and then basically smudge it in, this is like an extra wave, okay, it's the following morning, hard time getting things together this morning too, so we have a snowstorm coming tomorrow, so we're getting ready for that, I let these dry overnight in the damp cupboard, so they're actually, that one is just past leather hard I would say, and this one is leather hard, I don't need to do anything as far as the lid fit, because it's perfect, so all I got to do is trim the bottom, and I want to do a little bit of chattering if I can on that area there, and I'm using a Giffin grip obviously to do the trimming, so let's just do this one and see if I can do it without breaking the tail off, I have 16 of these, one of my trimming tools, this one is now my new favourite, which wasn't meant to be a trimming tool, it was meant for those boxes, but it works as a trimming tool, and then I have other ones, I'm going to try this one, much better, so I'm trying to create a texture that will be resembling some sort of wave, that's more of a pattern, so that's not quite as what I'm looking for, okay, I think I've been barking up the wrong tree a little bit with the chattering on this part, so all I've been doing is using my little R2 tool and just waving it while I'm trimming, and that gives me a much better feeling of watering waves, wiggle it fast, wiggle it, slow the wheel down, wiggle it fast, speed it up, wiggle it fast, and you get a whole bunch of lines where the glaze will actually catch, I'm going to sponge the edges of these lids because I can't really get to it, so when I finish I'll do that, but you can see you get these wiggly lines, it'll look like water, one day I'll find a use for that brush that it's meant for, on this one it was a little tight, it fits, but it's tight, and I know when I get the glaze on it's going, oops, I have to get these to, because the Giffinger doesn't hold something that small, I make my feet fairly small, so I'm just trimming a little bit off the inside of the rim of the bowl itself, it won't take much, it wasn't even gripped for no reason, yeah, that's how it fits.