Hey there YouTubers, this is Off Centered Potter. Hey, what’s up? I am doing a video for Shere’s students. I just recently met Shere through YouTube and I am school counsel and I do clay therapy a lot with students and Shere told me that she also uses clay with her students. And so I thought I would make this instructional video to demonstrate how a beginner might get started with pottery.

So if you are not a beginner. If you are not a beginner then this video will be incredibly boring to you. But, if you are just getting started, you might find this video to be useful. So let get to the wheel!

Okay, to start centering, I am going to get my hands nice and wet, get the clay wet and I am going to turn the wheel unto to a fairly fast speed. I am going to use my left hand, placing it on my knee, pushing my palm and just getting the clay started by just kind of smoothing out of it. Okay, just kind of smoothing outside, keeping my hand in the clay plenty wet. I am going to take my top hand and I am going to do a karate chop on the top, this part of my hand stays on the center top of the clay then I am going to relax my hand over, grab my thumb with my other thumb and I am creating this little shell sort of that the clay is going to adhere to or make a tone there. So I am pushing down on the side. I am pushing on the side and I am pushing down the top and I am coursing that clay into this little molt. And you see that clay that comes off. That always happens to me, does not happen to everyone. It depends on how you center, but that is just clay that was off centered. It was—there is more on one side than other, so it came off in my hand.

I am not really pushing as much as I am trying to hold my hand very steady and just kind of forcing the clay to go to my hand. And that is another mistake that we sometimes make when we are first learning how to throw is we just kind of go with the clay and you do not want to do that. You want to force clay to go to you.

So we are just forcing the clay to go into the shape of my hand and it is also important sometimes to slowly take my hands off and slowly put them on. That is called revisiting and we want to do that frequently during the centering process, but make sure that when you take your hands off the clay, you just do gently and you gently put them back on because even the slight motion control your clay off center. So keep on the clay plenty wet and this is the part where you have to listen, get to listen to the clay. “Hello!” You have to listen with your hands, feel where the core is off centered. Feel where you feel the bumps, keeping your hand in this position. Then I can ramp my thumbs around if I would like. Then my clay is working its way into the center.

Another thing that I can do is I can do was called coning. Once I get it close to the center, I can bring the clay up into a cone and push it back down again. The way I do that is I use this part of my hand, the side. I am going to kind of undercut the clay, putting pressure down there and lifting it up and somehow to serve very good of this and I am not as good, but I am practicing. So I get it up into a cone. I keep doing this and if you are going to cone, one of things that you have to practice doing is again, you will listen what you hands and make sure that you do not hold your hand in one spot too long because this is will just come out in a bring trunk. Okay! So I am just pulling straight up, bringing that up into a cone. Like this and once I get that into a cone, I am going to put pressure a little bit on the side and more with this part of my hand, raising my arms on the wheel and I am pushing straight down. And I will avoid letting the clay go into a mushroom shape. I do not want that. I want the clay to stay straight up and down. So I have to make sure I put plenty of pressure on my side hand to keep from becoming too much of a mushroom. Push down, okay,

Now you can see I am pretty much back into that same centering position. I am putting pressure with the pinky on my left hand to get that bottom into center. Now, I am putting pressure on the middle fingers, now the top fingers, keeping the top hand steady. Okay, I think that my clay to the most part is pretty centered. One of the things I like to do is use this tool which is called the red tool at this stage. I just gently go in here. I trim all the excess clay off and that is just kind of a preference. I do not if actually has much value. This is just kind of preference to me so I can tell better if the clay is centered.

When I first warning to center clay, the thing that I can do to test is I can look at my hands and say, “Can I put my hands on my clay and do my hand stay steady? Do they do not rubble around anywhere?” And as you can see, “Your hand is staying pretty, pretty much where they belong, if there are a little bit of warble here, then nothing too terrible.” Okay if I can do that, then I know that my clay is pretty centered.

Another thing that I can do is use a mere because sometimes you can see a lot more in a mirror than you can on looking straight down on your clay. And I am not using a mirror today because I am video tapping, but usually I have a mirror that sets right here so I can see what is going on.

So I am just going to step back and look and that looks pretty good to me. So now we are ready to move on to the next step.