Five Expert Tips for Working with Soft Slabs The one and only Lisa Naples shares some great slab pottery tricks! Lisa Naples

Lisa Naples is a consummate teacher with a gift for explaining how her hands manipulate the clay. That's why she makes working with soft slab pottery look so easy. If you have ever tried working with softer slabs, you know it is more difficult than the experts make it look. 

In today's clip, an excerpt from her video Flat to Functional: Handbuilding and Slip Decorating, I've gathered five particularly good little nuggets from the video to help improve your success with soft slab pottery!  - Jennifer Poellot Harnetty, editor

This video was excerpted from Flat to Functional: Handbuilding and Slip Decorating, which is available in the Ceramic Arts Network Shop.

To learn more about Lisa Naples or to see more images of her work, please visit www.lisanaples.com.

More on Soft Slab Pottery

If you have caught the slab pottery bug, you've come to the right place for inspiration! To get you started, check out this article by Daryl Baird on using slump molds with soft slabs! Liz Zlot Summerfield is also an excellent resource for slab building techniques. Birdie Boone works with super thin slabs to make her ultra light slab pottery. Check out this video on how to use a slump mold to make a platter as an example. If you have trouble controlling your soft slabs when hand building, you could try Lisa Pedolsky's technique of using tar paper as a support. This technique enables Lisa to work on her forms at various stages of dryness and get great results. There's more than one way to work with slabs. Try various techniques for your slab pottery and find the one that works for you!

**First published in 2014.