Making Puff Paint Animals

Video Transcript

"In this segment I'd like to show you how to use dimensional paints, or as I call them, puff paints. So I'm going to walk you through a couple little insects that you can make on your piece, and they add really neat, really neat highlights. So I'm going to show you how to do a ladybug first. And dimensional paints come from a couple different companies, and they are really fun to use, and they are completely opaque glazes, so they're great for doing on top of colors, so a lot of people use them for writing, designs, dots, squiggles, lines. Really great for kids to use too. So what I'm going to do to start off my ladybug is I'm simply going to draw, almost like an egg shape. So I'm just going to take the dimensional paint, and I've got red to start off, and I'm just going to start to work with it. I find my reds a little hard to use today. And all I'm going to do, is I'm actually not going to be pressing to fill in any more paint, I'm just going to take the tip of my nozzle and sort of rub it into, and gather the paint that I got from the edges, and pull it into the middle. The reason why I'm doing this is dimensional paints have a tendency to crack if they're put on too thick. They'll crack during the firing, so we definitely don't want that to happen, so we're just going to spread out our puff paint to create a nice thin layer on there. So we've got sort of the body done of our ladybug, and now we're going to go and do the head. And then we can always go back and add any antenna or eyeballs that we'd like. So now I'm going to do the head, and we're going to make almost a half circle, and then add that on. I'm going to go back with my red and fill in any spots that I may want. We can always go back after the puff paints dry and add other detail as well, which always is really, really nice to do. You can add little feet, if you want to draw the dots on the back of the ladybug. And fill that in. So, that's kind of our ladybug there. The other thing we can do, is you take a little bit of water and clean up our edges with a small, fine paintbrush, and actually just pull the paint to sort of how we want it. And this helps smooth out the puff paint as well, and create better shape. And I'll sort of let that dry. I know it doesn't really look like a ladybug right now, but we'll go back and we'll add the details, the stripes and the dots later. So we'll let that dry up a bit, and we'll do a different one. So next what we're going to make is a little tiny fly that will just be right next to the ladybug. The flies are really easy to do. All we're going to do is we're going to make three different dots, a big, a medium, and a small. So all we're going to do, is we're going to next to our ladybug here, sort of going to go in the middle, and we're just going to create one dot there, then sort of a medium dot, and we're going to connect them, so it's okay if they touch, and sort of blend together. So I've done three dots, and that will sort of be the body. I know it doesn't look like much now, but that will be the body of our fly. Then, we can take any color, and add our wings on. And I like to do the wings fairly big and sort of spread out, so all I'm going to do is I'm going to squeeze lightly onto our tile, and then I'm going to fill it in. And so again, I'm not adding any more extra paint, I'm just taking the nozzle and spreading the paint out. I'm giving him nice big wings. And again we're going to go back later, and add little eyeballs to him, to sort of bring him to life. And I've gone over my black there a little bit, so I'm just going to go with a little bit more puff paint, and sort of define him a little bit more. If we want, to be neat, he looks also neat, if you look, to do little short fat wings too, and that looks nice. So, what we're going to do now is let these dry, and then we're going to do our details. So now that we've let our puff paint dry, pretty much, we're going to go back and fill in the details, and really bring our bugs to life. So, all I'm going to do, is I'm going to take a white paint and add some eyes. So all I'm going to do is just two dots on the top of the ladybug's head. And also, with the same liner brush, I'm going to add little dots to the tops of her eyes. And I'm going to do the same thing to our little fly. You could also go back, and with a fine brush, and do any veining that you wanted to do in the wings. I generally like to keep mine plain. And that's basically how we do our puff paint animals!"