So I'm on a fun binge. My weekends are filling up quite nicely. Two weekends ago I gathered up some girlfriends and we spent several hours at a Color Me Mine. For those of you who don't know what that it, it's a crafty store that's all about painting and decorating pottery of all kinds. They have plain ceramic (?) pieces for you to paint on. You then leave it there for them to glaze and fire and then pick up the finished product.
To get the suspense out of the way. Here's my Twilight themed pasta bowl:
This bowl is based off of the first book in the Twilight series. See it? It's my version of the meadow scene with a lion and lamb in the middle surrounded by wild flowers. The outside of the bowl is painted the darker green of the edges with dark green and olive green trees to represent the forest surrounding the meadow. I love it. Needless to say, my girlfriends were oohing and ahhing over it and immediately had craft remorse.
How I did it: I had the idea of this in my head. I just didn't know how to do the lion and lamb in the middle. So I do what any savvy girl does. I Googled "lion lamb". The image on the right is what I was trying to draw. I didn't want to be quite so literal so I flipped the picture horizontally. Originally I sketched this onto the plate then started to paint. The paint started to smudge the pencil marks to I erased all but a faint few lines. They tell you that you can't paint light colors over dark so I had to paint the white of the lamb first. What I did was paint a white blob to cover the area then took the brown and a very thing brush and painted a brown outline around it. The green came next. They say to do a minimum of three layers of paint for the color not to fade after firing. I tried to leave the "lion" as empty as possible and tried to really define the bottom of the lamp. I covered the entire bowl in the new grass green. The lion is two shades of brown. It's tedious painting, waiting for it to try, and re-painting to get the colors to fix. The darker brown shows up in his mane, the tip of his take, and in his nose/mouth feature. I was going to do eyes but my brush wasn't fine enough. I started to paint a face on the lamb but the paints doesn't lead to fine lines and I quickly wiped/painted over it.
Then I covered the sides of the bowl a medium green and with a medium brush, made lots of grass strokes to represent blades of grass. I made sure that it almost touched or went over just a bit onto the bottom of the bowl into the light green. Then I took a dark green and painted the edge and the rim and re-did the blades of grass onto the medium green. Once all dry, I covered the sides of the bowl with "flowers". Dots of purple and blue, blossoms of white, petals of red and orange and hints of yellow are sporadically spread out. I didn't want to overwhelm it with too many flowers.
The outside of the bowl was painted in a similar but simpler way. All dark green with thick trunks of brown and happy little trees (ala Bob Ross) in a darker and dusty greens. I signed the bottom and called myself done. Overall, it took around two hours. I spent a lot of time hemming and hawing over little details. We're going back next month and I'm determined to not stop until I have a whole Twilight set. I'm thinking that next time, I'll paint a New Moon plate.
