Painting Leopard Print on Pottery

Video Transcript

"In this segment I'd like to show you how you can create a neat leopard look on your piece. Leopard print is something that's something really popular these days. It looks great absolutely on any piece and you'll know what I mean in just a minute. So, what we're going to do is we're going to do the leopard print on again a plain background. So I haven't painted the background, this is just the natural color of the bisque. All I'm going start with to create the leopard print is a rounded the brush. So a rounded the brush is just one that basically looks like this. You're going to have a nice, tall, rounded top to it. This helps because when it's wet, it actually creates a nice little point and that will really help you out too. So I am just going to dip it into a caramel color first and I'm just really, really simply going to make little dashes onto the piece. Then we're going to later add our black highlight. So all I'm going to do is you almost want to make the shape of macaroni. So you're almost going to create little ticks here and there. I'm just doing it very, very loosely all over and have it go all in different directions. Because you work with it once you start to put your black highlight on. I know it might not look like much right now, but you'll see how we can sort of work with it there. Like the large squiggle I just made, we can work with that too. So I'm really going to fill this up so you can actually see a really and get a really good taste of how leopard print can look on your piece. So, after I have these guys I would want to let this paint dry completely before we start to do the black, so that you don't get the two colors mixing. So I'm going to dry this and we'll be right back to do the rest. So now that we've let it mostly dry, we can go ahead and do our black. So I'm going to grab a different paint brush this time. It's again a rounded one, it's just a little bit smaller. Just so we want to add a little more detail to the little squiggle if we can. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to again create these again little squiggles almost on top of our first macaroni shapes. So I'm going to be very loose with it and go back. I'm just basically bordering either side of the caramel shape that I just made. Just really gently doing some squiggles and this is just sort of a loose leopard print and you'll sort of see it come together as we go. So when we first did our caramel, we did only do one coat. The reason we only did one coat is that we had a little bit of movement with the piece. If you had a completely opaque dot, it might look a little, a little harsh. So we're just going to keep it light and playful and keep going and just have our one coat. So with the black again, we're only going to do, again we're only going to do one coat, again to have a little bit of movement in the paint. So you can actually see your brush strokes. So when you are doing your little squiggles, just keep in mind just to keep it really loose, no one's grading you so it will be okay, and just keep it really fun!"