1st Proper Throwing Lesson (re uploaded due to issues)

At the start of September i met Jim Robison at Art in the house at Cliff House. It was amazing to meet him and i have to admit i was quite star struck. I showed Jim my portfolio as i tend to take my portfolio everywhere i go and we had a good chat for at least 30 minutes. After chatting for a while another gentleman came up to us and said goodbye to Jim and i got to show him some of my photos i then told him about my desire to learn to throw and he offered to teach me to throw! I was over the moon i finally was going to get to properly learn. He gave me a business card and told me to contact him to organise meeting up.

I was quite anxious about messageing him so i have to admit I deliberately put off contacting him until i had started back at university. After writing many drafts of the text i was going to send him i sent it and 2 days later i got a reply. Me being me was like a kangaroo with excitement jumping all over my brothers house (while we had family friends over) shouting "He replied" thankfully our family friends understand that im easily excited by things like this 😂. A few days later i rang him and we arranged to meet up.

At first we felt the whole set up of his studio was abit unusual its round the back of a beautiful bungalow. In the center of the studio are some tables and around the outside there are shelves and work surfaces with lots of work in progress and pots of materials. At the other end of the studio there is a sink and 2 beautiful wheels one being an older shimpo style wheel and one being a larger gladstone type wheel with a yellow splashpan.

When we had finished having a good chat and telling him how excited i was to be learning to throw after being in to ceramics since September 2014, he started with showing me how to spiral wedge... lets just say he makes it look so much easier than it actually is and i just couldn't wrap my head around it. After spending awhile attempting to spiral wedge he showed me how to center and throw a cylinder on the wheel. Then it was my turn... with this being my 3rd attempt at throwing i felt a little bit more confident than when i first started but coning and centering took a long time to do i then opened the clay out and pulled up the walls (gosh even im making it sound easy... i can assure you its not easy) we had a break and i told him that it was one of my ceramics dreams to make a mug to drink tea from so i went back on the wheel and neatend up my cylinder and after we had dried it abit with a heat gun i took it off of the wheel.

He then showed me how to pull a handle which is something ive never done before and we attached the pulled handle to the mug. Once the mug was finished i was over the moon with it. Its my first ever mug and I couldn't believe that (with lots of help) i had thrown it and it was only my 3rd time throwing.

Over all im really happy that im learning to throw. Its something ive wanted to learn for a long time. As this experience was a few weeks ago and ive had 2 lessons since. Im now in the process of buying my own wheel so i can continue to practice at home. Im looking in to buying a Shimpo Whisper RK-3E VL wheel as ive been told by many people that it is a good wheel and if i can afford it I should go for the more powerful wheel. Also my other reson for picking the Shimpo Whisper is that its nearly totally silent so means i can throw at all hours of the day without disturbing my parents.