Painting Pottery with Toothbrush Spattering

Video Transcript

"In this segment I'd like to talk a little bit about toothbrush spattering. The toothbrush spattering is a really great design for, I mean a really good, neat, little design detail to a piece. You can also use it to really highlight different portions of your piece. So today I'm going to start on a white background. But there are really neat ways to use a toothbrush where you actually have a colored background and you use other colors to highlight. For instance, if you were going to do a sand technique, if you did a light brown in your background, then simply do the toothbrush spattering effect and with a darker brown on top it creates a really unique sand look. Today I'm going to show you a couple of really nice highlighting colors and it looks really fantastic on our piece. So we are going to get started. So all I have is an ordinary household toothbrush and we are going to use it just to flick onto your piece. So the way we start, I've picked three colors here and I'm going to start with the dark turquoise. All I'm going to do is I'm going to dip the top portion of my toothbrush directly into the paint. Then, I'm going to take my thumb, pull back and just start to flick. So it creates this really neat spattering effects and I can really adjust it to how much spattering I want to create. You can create really nice big spatters or really fine textured spatters by basically how far away you hold your toothbrush from the tile. So without changing or washing my toothbrush, I am actually going to dunk directly into my other color. So I've used the turquoise first, now I am using the purple and it just creates a little bit of highlight. This will show up a little bit more after it's been fired. Powdery paints generally are a little bit more pastel before they're fired and they'll turn out really, really bright after and shiny, of course. So I am dipping in the green again, I haven't washed my toothbrush, although some people do prefer to wash. I think it sort of creates a little more of a marbling technique if you don't clean your toothbrush. Then I'm just going to go ahead and spatter on top. Now there's one neat thing you can do with spattering and it creates a really neat look to your piece. It's simply by using paper, ordinary paper, that you sort of tear off into little sections and use it to create different portions and concentrations. So I am doing this right over my tile. I'm going to take a different highlighting color, I'm going to take a darker green and by covering the space, I am going to sort of create a shape and I hoping the camera will be able to pick it up. So I'm just covering and really spattering heavily around the paper and when you remove the paper, you're going to get the edge of that paper. It creates a really neat whiteout effect. These are some really neat techniques you can use with a toothbrush."