Blending Colors when Painting Pottery

Video Transcript

"In this segment I'm going to show you how to blend from one color to the other. There's a couple of different ways you can do this to highlight different parts of your pieces. For instance, if you're doing a vase, you can go from one shade of let's say, light blue to the top of the vase being dark blue. Today I'm going to do a tile and on the tile I'm going to create a little wave effect, where I'm going to highlight three different colors and I'm going to blend all three colors together. Let's get started and I'll show you what I mean. First off, I'm going to have a light green in the middle and that's going to be my sort of highlight color, I guess you call it. Then I'm going to use two other colors to blend around it. So I'm just going to really free form. I'm just going to do a fine little wave. I'm going over what I've done a couple of times. Generally, when you're working with pottery glazes you do want to let your paint dry each time in between each coat, but today for times sake, I'm just going to keep going and blend. One other thing where you want to remember when you're blending is, you want to work with wet paint, you actually don't want your paint to be too, too dry, otherwise you lose that movement of paint. So what I've got now is, I've just got a nice little green sort of wave in the middle. Now I'm going to start to add my two other colors. So all I'm going to do to help blend my green to my other color is I'm going to double-dip my brush. So I'm going to dip. I'm using a square brush which is really important to help blend the two colors together. So I'm dipping half of my paintbrush into the green and half of my paintbrush into a purple. So all I'm going to do now is, I'm going to take my paintbrush and put it in the middle of the line I just did and start to blend the purple and the green together. Now keep in mind, when you're actually doing your brush strokes, if your paintbrush starts to pull at all, make sure you go and grab more paint. You really want your paintbrush to be able to glide all the way down your piece. That way you're actually helping the colors blend together. Keep going back and forth and really work the paint into a blend that you'd like. So once I reach, and I definitely want this white space to be purple, so I am just going to go back and fill in more purple and then continue with the double-dip and blend those two colors. So you can already see how it starts to blend quite quickly. To create a more opaque finish, what you want to do is keep going on top with the three good coats and keep doing the double-dipping. So I am just washing my brush and I'm going to dip it half in green and half in turquoise this time. So now I'm going to do is, I'm going to do exactly what I was doing the last time with putting my paintbrush right in the middle of my green wave and just going back and forth and really make sure you work the paint. You can see how it really nicely blends those two colors together. Then I'm just going to take it, my other turquoise and fill in my other area. Then go back and grab some green and clean off my brush a little bit. Then you have just sort of a neat, sort of wavy, blended look. So there's one thing you can do with blending your colors."