A Brilliant Warm-Up Exercise for Brushwork Decoration Add your own unique marks to your pots! Michael Kline

One of the great things about pottery as a creative endeavor is that it satisfies the desire to build an object for use with one’s hands. But in addition to the satisfaction that comes from crafting a useful form, potters also get to decorate their work using skills borrowed from other media like painting or drawing. This is why the brush has always been an important part of the ceramic tool kit.

I love love love the look of brushwork decoration, but up to now, I have been a big chicken about actually trying it myself. I’ve never been very good at getting nice fluid brushstrokes and I have never wanted to practice on a pot. I know I could practice on paper, but it’s just not the same. In today’s video, an excerpt from Michael Kline’s video The Brush & The Wheel, Michael explains a warm up exercise he came up with that approximates practicing on a pot with very low investment. - Jennifer Poellot Harnetty, editor

This clip was excerpted from The Brush & The Wheel, which is available in the Ceramic Arts Network Shop! Or CLAYflicks subscriber can watch the entire video on CLAYflicks by clicking here! Not a subscriber yet? No problem! Click here to subscribe to CLAYflicks to view the entire Ceramic Arts Network library of videos and expand your ceramics knowledge. 

To learn more about Michael Kline or to see more images of his work, please visit www.klinepottery.com.

**First published in 2015.