Easy Paint Your Own Pottery Ideas - Spots and Dots Designs

Teapots, mugs, plates covered in spots and dots are extremely stylish and popular at the moment. Emma Bridgewater has her Polka Dot design and visit any household section of department stores you will see lots of spotty and dotty pottery designs. But did you know there are several very simple ways suitable for all ages and abilities to of paint your own pottery with a dotty or spotty design.

Finger print spots

Your fingers make some of the best dots on pottery and ceramics, plus it is something even the youngest child with a bit of help can do. The only thing you need to do before starting your finger print dots is to make sure is that your fingers are clean and free of any grease. When you change colours make sure you clean your fingers well. A damp sponge to wipe your fingers on works quite well. The spots created with your fingers may not be perfectly round but they are unique, stylish and completely personal.

Round Stickers

You can buy round stickers in various sizes easily and cheaply from stationers and they can be used to create lovely pottery with white spots on a coloured background. All you need to do is stick your round stickers all over the surface your dry and clean bisque (unpainted, unglazed pottery) in a random pattern. Rub the stickers to make sure they are securely attached to the pottery. Then paint all the surface area in your chosen colour, this can be done with a paintbrush or sponge. To get a nice solid even colour at least two coats of ceramic paint are recommended. Once the paint is completely dry peel off the stickers and your pottery is ready for glazing and firing. If you can't get manage to lift the stickers at the edge a good tip is to take a pin and stick it in the sticker and lift.

To get coloured spots on a white background you can use ring binder reinforcement ring stickers. Again these are also readily and cheaply available from stationers. Just stick the reinforcement rings all over your pot, but instead of painting the background carefully paint the hole in the middle of the ring binder stickers and then peel the rings off when the paint is dry before glazing and firing.

Stamping your Spots and Dots

Instead of using your fingers at a stamp for dots and spots, your could use other round objects by immersing them in paint and dabbing them on your pottery. At craft shops you can buy various sponge tools called dabbers and daubers which also make round spots. Other household items you could use to stamp spots on your pottery are cotton wool buds, the end of your paint brush or the flat end of a pencil. The object does need to be clean and free from grease for starting each colour. With the cotton wool buds it is best to use a new one for each colour.

Use Round Objects as Stencils

Using a felt tip pen or soft pencil draw around round objects to create a spotty or circle design on your pottery. All pencil and felt tip lines when you paint your own pottery will disappear when your pottery is fired. This is because the professional firing is done at over 1000C causing the pencil and/or felt tip to burn off. You can then either paint inside the circles or leave the circles unpainted and paint the background. Areas not painted will go a creamy white when fired, how white the background is will depend on the type of glaze and bisque used. You can buy stencils with lots of different sized circles but you don't need these, you could just draw round some pots, bottles or lids that you have in the cupboard at home.

With these simple ideas anyone can paint their own pottery and create some stylish unique spotty, dotty and polka dot gifts to keep or give to family and friends. Examples of all of these spotty and dotty paint your own pottery ideas can be seen at www.potsoffun.co.uk.

About the Author

Gillian Groom set up a mobile pottery painting company in 2001, since then she has painted 1000's of children's hands and feet on pottery. She now offers a mail order service so parents or children's groups can create their own pottery masterpieces and keepsakes. For more information on Gillian's paint at home pottery kits visit http://www.potsoffun.co.uk/

Original article

How Artwork Renovation Is Undertaken

Art recovery is difficult work. Although clean-up of the work of art is typically essential for the purposes of conservation treatment, it's usually carried out for other reasons and different decisions can be just as legitimate so far as how the painting is restored as long as it can be carried out safely.

Of course, the end results might look different. Like a renowned artwork restoration expert once stated: "every cleaning is an act of significant interpretation". Nonetheless, in many instances it's possible and appealing to proceed through all of the stages of cleaning and reveal unobscured original paint. The cleaned artwork can be in practically perfect condition, or it can appear distinctively alarming with its old damages still showing. Paint may also be original but not have its original appearance. Colors might have changed colour or faded or even the actual transparency of the paint may expose under layers not originally obvious to the human eye.

The art repair expert then has got another decision that he must make. How much restoration should be done? That is, how much of the old damage that should be concealed by brand-new paint restoration and retouching? Clean-up choices definitely determine how a painting might appear, but so too will the approach to repair.

Restoration needs to balance two contradicting options, those of legibility and authenticity. On the one hand, the observer wishes to see a composition undamaged by deterioration and decline. Yet on the other hand, it is essential to know which parts of the original is actually painted and which aren't. Both of these needs are often satisfied by the restoration specialist insisting on a comprehensive image document of the actual work to be cleaned, followed by full painting restoration.

If the full photographic image of the original isn't found or even can't be obtained, it is up to the individual painting restoration specialist to take some inventive liberties in line with the adjoining areas of the painting as a guide. This is actually the creative portion of artwork repair and one that can't be calculated with charts and graphs. A qualified professional is the difference between the work of art appearing like the original and it appearing like a painting that's obviously been retouched and repaired.

It generally requires several years of training and continual polishing of techniques to make a painting that looks like the original. If a piece of art is a few hundred years old, this is often much more of a challenge because the painting recovery professional may need to make their own paint to make it just like the texture and color of the original. This is where the imaginative part of the equation is needed. Like I said previously, the majority of painting repair is more art than science.

Painting repair specialists use these careful solutions to clean and refurbish priceless works of art along with humdrum works of art which might be seen at the neighborhood library. The caliber of their artistry can most likely be measured by the experienced eye, in most cases it is the novice that may observe the actual results of restoration that are more obvious. Nevertheless, art repair is an important and essential job completed by trained specialists to create historical works of art preserved for our children and grandchildren to savor and appreciate for a long time to come.

To get the best information on painting restoration, check out our website all about oil painting restoration here!

Original article

Aviation Art - An Appraisal

Aviation Art is sometimes frowned upon as not being a true art form, merely illustration by people interested in the subject and aimed at aviation enthusiasts who wish to buy an aeroplane print only

This is a little unfortunate as it is the only art form that can show a true vista of air, land and sea with an aircraft or balloon painting being able to take in landscape, aerial or marine painting as well as recording the aircraft.

Aviation paintings also serve as an important historical document of 20th Century History as much of the world we know now was formed by the aerial warfare of WWI and WWII. While paintings of WWI battles were seen during the war it was not until WWII that the role of the war aviation artist came about with Frank Wooton and Terence Cuneo being the two most prolific. Indeed, both names became stalwarts after the war too.

It is, of course, not just warfare that aviation art has played a part in recording, the trailblazing of events and people such as the first crossing of the Atlantic by Alcock & Brown in 1919 and of Charles Lindberg in 1927 being examples of important events that have benefited from the art form.

Posters depicting aviation were also of the utmost importance as with the birth of civil aviation a new genre of aviation art was born, in conjunction with the style pervading in those days of Art Deco. These works are much renowned and collected in their original forms creating a lasting legacy of the beginnings of commercial air travel.

The genre can be split into various categories, with the main differences lying in whether the artist wishes to record the historical event and aircraft in great detail as no such picture exists or in looser styles to show the speed, grace and power of aircraft in general. There are those artists who can achieve both and it is these artists, I would suggest, that push Aviation art as far as it can go. Artists such as Robert Taylor, Nicholas Trudgian, Roger Murray and Ronald Wong sit very much in the first group, while in those that push boundaries are those such as Wooton and Cuneo, Roger Middlebrook, Anthony Cowland and Michael Turner

The mediums that can be used in aviation art include Oil, Acrylic, Watercolour and Pencil. Sculpture is sometimes seen but is rather limited by the size and complexity of the subject.

In review aviation art does have an important social role to play and while interest in it may have diminished from its heyday of forty years ago there is little to detract from its usefulness at recording social change in the years since 1903 and the Wright's first flight.

Lee Lacey is an Associate member of the Guild of Aviation Artists in the U.K and has had a lifelong love of aviation and aviation art. To view his work and the art of others mentioned in this article visit http://www.hansenfineart.co.uk/

Original article