Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Old School Ceramics, Part 3

ceramics3a

Saturday, I got to finally put some color on my ceramics pieces! I had antiqued them with black and Barbara advised me to prime the parts that were going to be white with a cream color. I primed those areas, then dry brushed white over them.

Dry brushing is just what it sounds like... you get a little bit of paint on the brush, then wipe it off (Barbara uses coffee filters for this) until there's only a little bit of paint left. Then, you lightly brush the paint on your piece. I learned that you dry brush in the opposite direction of the definition. For example, I dry brushed left to right across Santa's beard.

I dry brushed the cream, white, and then the flesh color. Barbara surprised me by telling me that we actually put blue eyeshadow on both of them! It felt strange to put blue eyeshadow on Santa, but I'm trusting Barbara - she definitely knows what she's doing.

I dry brushed pink on Santa's cheeks to give him his rosiness and I carefully painted on Mrs. Claus' lipstick. Barbara taught me how to do the detail work (and clean up!) with a very thin brush and very diluted paint. The thin brush worked so well to do the finer details like their eyeballs and to clean up where I hadn't "colored in the lines" very well with the white paint and the flesh paint.

It's so strange to look at them and trust that they're going to turn out. Barbara assures me that I'm doing well, but it's just so hard to believe when they still look so strange!

I can't go this weekend, but I'm really looking forward to the following weekend when I can finally get the red painted and hopefully do their eyes. They will start to look so much more "real" then! I still feel like I'm not doing it correctly, so I am just putting my trust in that they WILL turn out looking ok!!

ceramcs3b

This is how they looked when I left. Their skin still looks SO strange so I'm just not sure how that's going to look OK!

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3 comments:

  1. I think they look great! And skin tones are hard, I think they require a lot of different layers.

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  2. I think they look great!!! great tip about dry brushing across against the grain... or however you put it. :)

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  3. I love watching the transformation!!!!!!! You are SO PATIENT!!!!!!!!

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