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Advice For Doing A Demo, Please.


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I have agreed to do a wheel demo for a large corporation's Spring fun day.  It is an opportunity to promote my guild and the gallery I am associated with.  I will be indoors with a sink and concrete floor and good lighting.  Many of the visitors will be children.

Do you have any suggestions for what type of pieces to throw?  Are there things that seem to have a wow factor?  Do kids respond to different things that their parents, who would be the one's doing any

shopping?

 Is there a good plan that would let me take leather hard green ware home from this ?  I'm going to be throwing for over 3 hours , what sort of work will travel home with me the easiest?  On what type bats?

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I did a demo at a TV station once. The hot lights dried out the clay. Be careful of that one. Can't really say what you should demonstrate except something you do well. Talk in a relaxed manner and comment on occasion about what you are doing. Maybe discuss why you got into clay. 

I wouldn't worry about bringing stuff home. Just wad in up and start again when you get home.

My wow factor is to throw a round orb with a narrow neck. Then I blow into it and puff up the shape like a balloon. Kids love that. They always tell me I have clay on my mouth. Never fails.

 

Marcia

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Kids are a wonderful audience, young ones will be wowed by the simplest of things like a tall cylinder that turns into a pitcher or vase. Older ones still get awed when they are allowed to touch the clay to see how if feels in the hand. Heck, I have done some demos for schools where I would have the 5-6 year olds press their handprints in a large jar, as decoration with the help of the potter. This would then be fired and returned glazed to the school/classroom for everyone to remember their day with the arts. My best advice is to be natural, show your genuine enthusiasm for the clay, and the more energy you put into a demo, the more you get out of it in the way of excitement.

 

Have lots of fun!!

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I usually never took much home from a demo, unless it was a special piece like a demo. The shock value of throwing a nice sized nice pot, and then cutting it in half with a cutting wire is too delicious to give up.To let them see what the inside and outside, and thickness of the pot looks like is very educational for them.

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One thing that always got the kids was to throw something to failure (a cylinder that gets too tall) then smash it down.  This was for rotating groups of 3rd graders so it will be much harder to demonstrate for your varied audience.

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Guest JBaymore

clay lover,

 

If it is a static audience you can kind of plan out a basic "script" or "storyboard" as to what you are going to do and say.  Not too tight... just a rough plan.  If it is a rotating audience, then you need to figure out how to repeat key parts in a slightly different way ( for those that stay a long time) a number of times.

 

This kind of thing is the time to do the "dramatic" stuff.... not the subtle ones.  If you do something REALLY well...... that is highly visual... you HAVE to do that.  If you can throw big....... pop out a huge pot.  Have a couple of small buckets of white and dark iron based slips....... and bring some color and contrast into the equation.

 

If you want to demo more parts of the process, have some pre thrown / made pieces at leatherhard so that you can assemble or trim.

 

On a slightly different note.........

 

Please make sure to mention that the throwing process is just a tiny fraction of the work that goes into the whole process. Give a picture of the complexity and the time involved and the pesky failure rate.

 

The reason for this is that as you are there knocking out pots....... there are a bunch of folks standing there watching doing the math in their heads and thinking something like this..........

 

"Wow.... he made that mug/vase/plate/bowl in just a couple of minutes.  That would be X in an hour.  When I go to craft fairs or galleries I see these kinds of pieces selling for X/Y/Z/Q Dollars each.  Man... these guys are making a killing!"

 

This is for the adults in the group,..... not the kids. Although the kids hearing it is good too.

 

best,

 

.......................john

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