Selecting Porcelain to Paint

Video Transcript

"And I want to tell you a little bit about the porcelain. You need to have a nice piece of porcelain. If it has little nicks in it, then you do not want to use that, unless you are going to be able to put very dark paint over it, because the paint will gather in the scratch, and in your finished painting, you will have a straight line where it's darker in the scratch. Same way with a nick. And for those of us who have been painting for a while, we have learned to design the picture we're going to paint around those cracks and nicks so that we don't lose our blank porcelain. And if you work it into the design, it's rarely ever noticed. But for beginners, it's very important that you just skip using something like that and try to use a perfectly smooth surface. Another thing, if you buy porcelain or china from places like garage sales and flea markets, they'll almost always have the scratches on the surface. So they're not good to paint. And another thing, you need to make sure there's no hairline crack. Because when you put it in the kiln, and you heat it up to sixteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it's going to break. And sometimes if they've just been hit, and you may not know this, if they've been hit or knocked around that will weaken the structure and it will not be a crack, but when you go to fire it, it will crack at that time. It doesn't happen very often, but it does happen and that's just something that you need to be aware of. Another thing is you don't necessarily want to use really old china because so many times once it's fired, there will be mildew inside that. If it was never fired right the first time and you bring it up to those high temperatures, it will mildew and then you'll have little mold spots inside your glaze and it makes your piece completely unusable. So those are the things that you want to beware of when you pick your porcelain. "