Before we move on, let's take a second to talk about some basic terminology. Now when we're dealing with the wheel, for the most part, we're talking about utilitarian objects. And one thing to take note of is how intimate the connection is between the human body the human experience with that utilitarian object. For example, if you were to take this cup, this cup is an amazingly intimate object, you can fill every curve, you can fill it with every damn wherever the artists put little details into it, how the glaze came, the texture, the tactile experience of it. Now, you may take a look at a sculpture or a painting and visually meditate on it and appreciate it for its beauty. But you're not going to walk up to that sculpture and start licking it.

Okay, so think about that. That's a very intimate connection where if you're taking their handmade bowl or handmade cup You're actually sliding into your mouth, that's showing a great degree of trust between you and that object. And therefore you and the maker of that object. So it is a very intimate connection. And using a handmade, handcrafted object like this, it is not only a tactile experience, you know, it takes that that mundane experience of taking a drink of water in the morning and makes it into a life enhancing moment that you take note of in that morning. But it is also visually pleasing in it is a visual connection between you using that object or for the artists but also the person across the table watching you use that object and, you know, compare it to that mass produced solace slip cast mug.

All right. So the beauty of the handmade object is it's a real inspiration. It's a real life enhancing object. And to talk about that, in this this connection between the human body often we refer to the ceramic terminology the ceramic vessel in direct reference to the human body. So we have a rough little sketch up here. We could take a look at real quick of just a real classic s shaped vessel.

And as we move up to it, we would consider the base of the piece to be the foot. The major body of it is the body. The allegation here is referred to the neck. And then the upper edge is the lip or the rim. And you can see this, in pretty much every thrown vessel, we have our foot, we have our body, we have our neck, in our lip and our rim. Now again, there might be adaptations to this, whether it has a spout or handle that expand on this terminology.

And again, we'll move through all this terminology as we move through the sections. If we look at my ride, when we move to the wheel and actually start focusing on the wheel process and the steps, we're going to take a look at steps one through three, which will all be done in our control position. So if I refer to step one, or step two, this is where we're at step one, centering the clay, step to opening the clay up. So step three, Opening the bottom nice flat bottom rim slightly tighter than the base. The following steps four through six will be done in our throwing position, pulling up the walls like so, flaring out the top and then belly and in shaping our piece. From there, we can invert the vessel or flip it upside down and trim and finish our shaping process and removing that excess clay and finish our forming through those steps.

That's just a little bit of basic terminology of how to talk about the vessel as we move through these chapters.