Ceramic Studio

What you can do here

Set the wheel

Wheel runs from a lazy turn to a steady throwing speed. The wheel head is heavy, so it takes a couple of seconds to come up to speed or slow down, and the throwing rings on the bowl and the slip on the wheel turn past while the window light stays where it falls.

Wet the rim

Drag along the rim of the bowl. A darker wet line follows your finger and turns with the clay, then dries over about twenty seconds, the way damp clay does in a warm room.

Touch the water

Tap the little bowl of water on the stool and a single ring crosses it. Potters keep one at hand to wet their fingers and sponge.

Use it as your wallpaper

Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.

Live link

On a computer desktop

Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.

On a TV or a spare screen

Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.

On a phone or tablet

Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.

A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.

Why the rings on the bowl look like that

The fine lines running round the bowl are throwing rings: ridges left by the potter’s fingers as the clay was pulled up while the wheel turned. They run all the way round, which is why the bowl looks almost the same at every angle. What gives the turning away is the small stuff: a scuff on the rim, a smear of slip on the wheel head, the light catching one ridge and then the next.

About the sounds

Two recordings and one quiet layer: the hum of the wheel with wet clay under the hands, a single drop into the water bowl, and the air of a quiet room. The wheel gets louder as it speeds up; it never changes pitch.

If you’d rather just watch

• Screensavers drawn live in the browser, with music