How to Paint Lines of Pottery Glaze

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Jen from Clay Cafe and I'll be showing you how to take your ceramic piece from start to finish. In this clip I'm going to answer the question that is asked by so many customers. How do I paint a straight line? There are two different ways you can paint straight lines. I'll do the harder one first and then we'll get to the easy stuff. So first all you need to do. Grab yourself a little bit of paint. Take a nice square paintbrush so it's going to have nice clean edges on it. And this is where it gets a little tricky. You're just going to grab yourself some paint and try to do a straight line. So we're simply going to start with a nicely loaded brush and pull it right across. If it starts to run out like that grab yourself a little bit more and start to work it again. And I'm going to grab some more and work it still. So that's an attempt at a straight line without any help. The 2nd way is what I normally do, which is much easier. Masking tape. Masking tape is a great tool and can actually be used for quite a few different techniques. So to make a straight line on a simple flat piece is really easy. All you're going to do is tear yourself off a piece of masking tape. Put it on one side. Smooth it down. And this is directly onto the raw bisque. And we're doing right on the background. There is no paint underneath. And then tear off another piece of tape. Leave yourself a little gap depending on how wide you want your stripe. Smooth your tape down and simply take the same square brush. Get yourself some more paint and just paint. Now because you've got the paint there it's going to protect either side and give you really nice clean lines. Masking tape will stick really, really well to raw bisque but you've got to be careful when you're putting it over a painting surface. Just make sure that your piece is totally, totally dry before you try to attempt to put the masking tape on. You'll actually find, if you're trying to put masking tape over wet paint it won?t stick. So give it some time, let it dry and then you'll have a nice surface to attach your tape to. Once you've got three good coats. Then what you're going to do is remove your masking tape to see the stripe that you've done. I haven't let mine dry quite yet and I don't really have three coats but we're going to tear it off just to show you. So when I tear the masking tape off you'll see that I've created a nice straight, straight line. So we can compare the two. This is with no guidance. This is with a bit of guidance. So it really works well when you're trying to make stripes. If you're doing diagonals it works really, really well."