How to Use Puff Paint

Video Transcript

"In this segment, I'd like to show you a different technique using puff paint. This time we're going to use puff paint first, to almost make a stained glass look on the piece. So what we're going to do is we're going to draw just simple shapes, do our puff paint, and then I'll show you how to make our stained glass. So all I'm going to do is I'm taking a pencil and I'm just going to draw upside down and, hopefully, draw a half decent heart here. Of course I'm drawing upside down, so we'll see! And I'm going to do a star as well. And I'm going to try to do that not so much upside down. And I sort of want it to be offset a little bit too. I don't want these shapes to be completely perfect. So now I'm going to do, now that we have our rough shapes, Oh! and I want to say a note about the pencil. Pencil will actually burn off in the kiln, so it's a really neat tool to use. You just want to be careful of how heavy you're doing your pencil lines, so just do them enough so you can sort of see and follow, but you really don't want to sketch hard with pencil, or press hardly into your bisques, or your raw clay. So all I'm going to do now is we're going to take our puff paint, and we're going to outline this piece, and by doing this we're actually going to be doing sort of creating a well that we're going to later add paint to. And by creating this well, what we're going to be doing is creating a really neat stained glass look. And the reason why the paint will create a stained glass look is when it's firing, the pool, or the well, that we've created by our puff paint, the paint will actually sort of creep up the sides and create a really neat look, just like stained glass, with the lead lining to it. So here we've started to fill in our heart with our paint to create that stained glass look. And all we're doing is we're saturating our brush and it's just starting to fill in, pulling it right up to the edge of the puff paint. And our puff paint will always keep our nice straight line which will be great when we're finished. So I'm just really pouring the paint in there, pretty thickly, and then I'm just going to leave it, and move on to my next. One thing we can do that also creates a really neat effect is we can actually start to blend colors within our puff first. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to start with an orange, and just sort of dab it in there, and I'm not worrying too too much about where it goes. And then I'm going to take another color and start to blend in, and just to create a little bit of a different look doing our puff first technique. So it might look a little messy right now when the paint creeps up the sides of the puff paint, but after it's fired you really won't see those marks too much, so I really wouldn't worry about them. So now that our paint is still wet, I'm not going to change my brush, and I'm going to dip it into a blue or a turquoise, and all I'm going to do is I'm going to swirl the paint into the middle. And I'm not going to work it too too much because I sort of want to keep the two colors sort of swirled, and some a little bit more concentrated than others. And I'm going to leave it just like that, and it will fire with those two colors sort of inter-mixed in there. And it will look really neat."