Fingerpainting with class - Save a Teapot.

I must admit, I've had a love hate relationship with the glass and porcelain paints, trying to bend them to my will, sometimes working with my cake dish and sometimes not...(with projects now in the bin) but one thing I never tried with these paints...it just using my fingers.

Going at it like a little kid, and just fingerpainting. We all did it, once upon a time, took to paint with wild abandon and I decided to today I was going to do the same.

Today we are turning a $1.00 op shop teapot into something a little more inviting!

Today we are using the following supplies
An Op Shop unloved teapot.
1. Paintbrush (which I barely used)
2. Plastic palette to mix colours.
3. The Pebeo Porcelaine 150 paint pots in various colours.
4. Black Pebeo Porcelaine markers for little bit of outlines
4 Your Fingers!

I love messy flowers, they are fuss free and anyone can create messy painterly looking flowers with not much effort at all!

First you want to get your red out  two blobs, one for pure red, and one for mixing with white to get depth into you flowers.
After having a lot of issues with paintbrushes, this is where my idea for finger painting came from!

I created one big red flower on one side of the teapot and two smaller flowers, this was just creating the general shape of a poppy, I did say fuss free its easy to make these look more involved then they are. I got so involved and excited about the flowers there was no images of this! I forgot I was making this for others!

 I mixed some red and blue together on the side to make a dark purple almost black, and just dabbed it into the center on each flower.

 Its a little messy but its total fun!












I then wanted to make some messy looking foliage so I grabbed the green pot, and added some white to lighten it up, I added pure green, and lightened green to create 'leaf like shapes' see you don't need to be an artist to make this teapot look cute.

I had the two separate greens on two fingers and just added them interchangeably. 

Just pop the greens in the places around the red flowers, lights and darks and before you know it you have a painterly looking poppie posie.

I then waited  a night for one side to dry, then started the second side, as I needed to lie it down so gravity didn't take my flowers to the bottom of the pot.

I also wanted to give the spout and handle some flare, so I created a striped handle, just a tip, if you want a very opaque black, you will need to apply the black in layers, it took me many layers of black to get it opaque to my liking.

as you can see in this terribly lit image (I was working at night) this was two layers, it took 7 layers of black to get it the way the finish look.

In the end I ditched the brush and started applying the black with my fingers to get a thicker layer of black.
I added little white highlights to the center of the flowers, and little black outlines around some of the leaves to give depth.

Once you are happy with your teapot, give it a full 24 hours to cure before you put it in the oven.
150 degrees for 50 mins. After the 50 mins, is up I turned the oven off and left the door open to let it cool fully before removing it.

And then the finished product looks a little something like this!

 It may not be designer, but its handmade and imperfect and I'm in love with it!

So go save a teapot from an op-shop and give it another life. Its a lovely weekend project, and leaves you with something that no one else will have! also makes a very cute house warming gift for loved ones.
Stay tuned for another project I have installed next week for the book lovers.

Courtney Diaz