How I Give My Pottery Character | Making a Yunomi

At what point does giving a piece more character become forcing it? And how much should I actually decide myself before I let the clay, the glaze and the firing have their say? This is how I made most of my Shino Yunomi cups this year. I start with around 380-400 g of a local Polish stoneware mix with a lot of grog in different sizes. When throwing, I deliberately leave the walls fairly thick. I only trim the foot, leaving enough clay on the outside to come back later with a knife and start cutting into the form. For the faceting I use the cheapest vegetable peeler I can find in a regular grocery store. They happen to work best for me. I actually prefer using one that has already become slightly dull - it lets me work gently without worrying that one pull will suddenly take off too much clay and leave me with a hole. The idea isn't to make the yunomi perfect. But it isn't really to make them imperfect either. And I'm not trying to add “character” or uniqueness just for the sake of it. The faceting changes the curves of the form, and that changes what happens to the Shino. I usually glaze these by pouring, so instead of flowing evenly over a smooth surface, the glaze collects in some places, gets stopped by an edge, changes direction and builds up somewhere else. Cutting into the clay also exposes the grog. Those little holes and rough surfaces take the glaze completely differently from the smooth surface left by throwing. So maybe the interesting part isn't deciding exactly what the finished yunomi should look like. Maybe it's creating enough conditions for something interesting to happen - and knowing when to stop. The technique in this video isn't a tutorial. It changes, and hopefully it always will. I like trying something different, changing the way I work and seeing what happens. But this is the way I've been making most of my Shino yunomi this year. How much is too much? I'm still figuring that out.