Pottery Making Illustrated Articles (Simple)

The salt cellar I create is a squat, simple form with straight walls and a wide, flat-topped lid. This shape leaves plenty of room for surface detail to remain visible.

I’m drawn to the seemingly infinite variations I can create within color. All color schemes are premeditated, planned out in my notebook, and then I adjust as I go.

Rethinking the concept of a resist and what makes it work, or not work, opens up a whole new world of possibilities for resist decoration.

Despite being one of the most ancient forms of creative expression, there are seemingly endless possibilities to adapt and develop to achieve new and exciting results.

Most of the finished pieces end up with creatures resembling actual animals, but once in a while, I make a weird, unknown creature, and that gives me a little zap of creative energy.

I use the seasons as a jumping- off point to keep my work rotating and fresh. I tend to look at graphic design, textiles, and paper crafts as a reference for color and motifs.

Use a wiggle wire to facet the sides of freshly thrown pot.

In this issue, surface decoration is the focus, and each artist dives into the deep end.

This project is the perfect introduction to carving. A single tile would make a great trivet, or arrange a few to create a piece of wall art.

Plates are hard! Deceptively so (as anyone who’s tried can tell you). It’s taken me about ten years of experimentation to finally arrive at a solid, straightforward design and technique.

While there are infinite ways to make them, with a box-form lid or a gallery-type lid, the following is how I handbuild them with an inset gallery lid.

This bowl, in my Caldera Series, is one of my favorite forms. When I get the curve of the walls and the edge cut and textured just right, paired with the curved bottom, it strikes a beautiful tone.

In the world of custom pottery, the relationship between the potter and their clients goes beyond just delivering a finished product.

I love experimenting with new tools and discovering new ways to achieve a particular look or effect.

Whether using a found object, grinding down hacksaw blades, cutting out your own shapes from clay and bisque firing them, or laser cutting your own tools from pressboard, you need a hard edge to make a crisp impression

While adhering to the bounds set by defining components of pots, I feel the freedom to create work that makes their functionality plausible, but more secondary in consideration.

I am really inspired by the ceramics community as a whole. Besides being great artists, I feel that clay people are just really good people and super fun to be around.

Swap out the standard X-Acto blade for more complex blades to make different marks and cuts in clay.