Using Stamps When Painting Pottery

Series Summary

People have been making pottery bowls, figures and other clay ware for centuries. Pottery vessels created to carry food or water date back as far as 10,000 BCE in Japan and North Africa, and were originally hand built and fired in bonfires. The potter's wheel was developed around 6,000 BCE in Mesopotamia and completely revolutionized pottery production. Made from sand, grit, crushed shell or other crushed vessels, pottery clay could be be molded by adding water. Clay bowls, cups, plates and vases are then fired in a kiln to create a permanent change in the clay, increasing strength and hardness.

So, once a piece of pottery is made, it's not necessarily finished. You may want to add a creative design to the clay with a little bit of painting. In this free video series, a pottery expert will teach you a number of painting techniques to use on ceramics and pottery. You'll learn how to use stamps, toothbrushes, bisque pencils, and masking tape to create specific effects. You'll also learn how to use puff paint, how to paint in leopard or zebra print, and even how to create a patchwork effect! The possibilities are endless, but these techniques will really add a refinement to your creativity, so watch these videos today!

Video Transcript

"In this segment I'd like to show you some tips on how we can stamp on our pieces to create designs on them. There's a couple things you want to remember when you're stamping and that is when you're applying paint, not to do it too thickly and to grab the proper tools to apply the paint to your stamps. Today what I'd like to show you is how we can use stamps to actually decorate a whole piece and make a scene around your stamp. So what I'm going to do first, I've grabbed two different colors of green, a light and a dark. And all we're going to do is create sort of a background for our stamp. And then create a design around it. So very simply all I've done is I've grabbed a nice square brush and that's just to cover larger areas and it's also going to help me lessen the chances of getting brush strokes onto my pieces. So I've just dunked it fairly well into my paint. And then I'm just going to start to apply the paint to the bottom of, I'm working with a tile. And it's really important to really saturate your brush and don't be afraid to use a lot of paint when you are starting. So I'm only going to go about an inch, inch and a half up my tile. And that's going to sort of create my grass. As you can see I'm not really creating any sort of detail yet. I'll work that all in later. So we're just going to get our base down. And now we're going to get ready to apply our stamp. That's just to give it a little bit of a base. So I'm not even going to change my brush. I'm going to keep that light green on there and actually it'll help me when I create some highlights on the piece. So all I'm doing is I'm taking a little bit of the paint and applying it to the rubber, or sorry, the foam stamp. Being careful not to add too, too much paint. You don't want to add too much paint to the stamp because it'll slide around on you and you'll actually end up with a bit of a blobby mess. So just be really careful. Sort of judge it. If you can see any really thick lines when you're applying the pain then it's probably too thick so just keep moving your brush around. Then after you've got it evened out you're just going to flip it over and stamp it directly down on your piece. Now I'm going to overlap on my background a little bit. And then just squeeze it down. And the really key thing when you're stamping is to pull straight off. And then we have our little alligator. And that's pretty much it."