How to Make Pottery on the Wheel for Beginners

There is a lot of equipment involved in making pottery on the wheel but it doesn't have to be overwhelming to get what you need to make pottery. This lecture walks you through all of the essential tools and equipment you'll need. I keep things really simple in my workspace and I'll show you how to keep it simple too!

Getting your hands in the clay and learning from your mistakes is the best way to learn pottery. So, we're going to jump right into making a pottery bowl on the wheel.

This lesson takes you step-by-step through:

• removing a ball of clay from the bag
• centering the clay
• pulling up the walls
• cutting your pot free from the wheel

Then we'll continue on to the other lessons to learn additional tips and techniques to make practicing these techniques easier and more fun.

Let's get started throwing pottery on the wheel!

Pulling up the walls of the pot can be very challenging. This video will introduce you to the basics of learning this important skill and get you started the right way.

This lecture includes a couple of simple secrets that can make all the difference when pulling up your walls. The key is how you think about what your fingertips are doing as you are pulling up. Watch to find out more.

Use this easy strategy to figure out if the walls of your pottery are the right thickness. This will also help you to know if you are bringing up your walls consistently and keeping them even from top to bottom

No one is perfect. We all create wobbly rims every once in a while, but it doesn't have to be the end for your pot. Here are two techniques for cutting off that wobbly rim.

Managing water right will make the process of pottery making much easier. Most of the time your hands need to be wet, but when they need to be dry it can get tricky. Follow this very simple strategy for drying your hands when you need to handle damp clay.

You have thrown a nice pot on the wheel. Now how do you get it off the wheel so you can throw another pot? If you have a lot of removable bats for you wheel you can just cut it free and then leave it on on the bat until it is leather hard and ready to be flipped over and cleaned up. If you only have a couple of removable bats and want to throw lots of pieces in one session, here is a great trick for getting your pot off of the bat without damaging it, so you can reuse the bat again immediately.

This is one of the most important videos in this series. It will show you several ways in which beginners commonly ruin their pots. More importantly, it will show you how to avoid those common mistakes so you can more quickly find success making pottery on the wheel.

Before you can successfully throw pottery on the wheel, you need to set up your workspace for success. This short video will walk you through setting up your wheel and your workspace. Whether you are working with a portable wheel on a kitchen table or you have the room to set up a dedicated studio this video will show you how. This will prepare you to learn how to throw a bowl in the next video.

Unless you're a prodigy you won't be throwing large vases right away on the pottery wheel. But it's important to be able to visualize a goal in your mind of what you will soon accomplish if you keep practicing. This video shows you how to use the techniques you have learned throughout this course to create a larger vase shape on the wheel.

Throwing plate is really satisfying because it seems like such an advanced technique. While it does have it's challenges, it's totally doable if you have the right technique.

This is just a super quick video to show you how simple it is to cut a plate off the wheel. The key is just, holding the wire really tight and really flat against the wheel head so that you don't cut up through the bottom of the pot.

Drying your pottery right is very important for successful trimming on the pottery wheel.

Re-centering your plate can be a challenge in itself, but this lecture will show you the easiest way to do this. I've tried a number of different ways, and some of them are almost impossible. This one is pretty easy with just a little bit of patience.

Trimming is a very fun and satisfying aspect of pottery making. If you get your clay just the right dryness (called leather hard) you can carve the clay off in little spirals of clay. Trimming also has the benefit of making your pottery look very clean, sharp and professional, and it takes a lot of weight off your pottery to make it lighter.

This is my bestselling eBook. I just wanted to include it here so you can learn the 5 most infuriating pottery problems most beginners face. I hope it helps!