How to Choose a Pottery Class

The Benefit of Classes

Learning how to make pottery whilst enjoyable in its own right, can be enhanced by professional teaching and sharing of experience with other students.

Classes help people learn quicker and provide the right learning environment to enjoy the experience as well as make friends. This should not be underestimated as many frustrations will become apparent along the way..There are both studio potters who run classes in evenings and weekends as well as local colleges who run part time and full time courses.

Be clear on your needs

One question you need to ask yourself is "do I want to learn the practical skills such as throwing on a wheel or do I want to have a good scientific/artistic understanding?" Knowing this will help define your teaching requirement.

I recently read a debate about when should you call yourself a potter? It was interesting to note that most people shared my view that "you never stop learning in pottery". As pottery making is such a wide subject, you can be an expert in part of it and a mere novice in another area.

Therefore at which point you become expert or call yourself a potter is purely arbitrary.

This point is important as you need to find an expert teacher in the area of pottery in which you want to learn more. 

Choose the right teacher and class

Choosing the right pottery class is not always easy. For example, if you have an interest in learning the basics of  pottery making then joining a class learning about Raku firing is less useful. Similarly if you purely want to learn artistic skills such as hand painting of china as a hobby, there is no need to learn about slip casting of bone china. Clearly it is important to ask the right questions to make sure a class meets your specific needs.

Some helpful links

The following links and brief details of classes may be helpful. Unfortunately I cannot make recommendations as there are so many of which I am not personally familiar. Therefore when making an enquiry please ask for references from previous satisfied clients and ensure that the classes meet your needs etc

Good Luck and enjoy!

Pottery Classes in USA
Directory of Pottery Classes, Courses, Lessons, Events, Workshops, Free Classes, in USA
Pottery classes and Art courses in UK
Directory of Pottery,arts and crafts classes, workshops and painting holidays in Britain and Europe.

More details of individual classes and workshops can be found below:-

Details of UK pottery classes

More information and other technical articles on pottery and ceramics can be found at my website The Potters Friend. Go now to sign up for my free newsletter.