How to Add Color to Gourd Designs

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Karen LoCasale and I'm here to tell you about crafting with gourds. Coloring your gourds, OK, there's lot's of different ways to color your gourds. And, some of the things you need to think about first is whether you're going to paint the inside of your design first or whether you're going to do the outside of the gourd or how much is gonna be the natural gourd is showing. But, some of the things you can use to do this, this particular gourd has been, the gourd itself is stained with leather dyes, the color in here that you see has been done with acrylic, just your basic acrylic paints. You can also use wood stains, woods stains work very well for doing an overall gourd. You can also use shoe polish, works very well to get a nice shine and some coloring on it. For your designs and some of the finer work you can use something as simple as a permanent magic marker. You can also use what they have out on the market now, they're called paint pens. Paint pents work really well. There's also the dyes that you use for rubber stamping, there's lots of different dyes out there for that that work. There's also fabric dyes, they don't work real well but you can again experiment with any of these. The best thing to do if you go to like a gourd farm to buy your gourds, they almost always will give you the broken and bits and pieces of the gourd. Those are always good to pick up because you can use those as your practice pieces to see how your coloring is going to look, how the dye is going to work with your acrylics and how they're going to interact. And again, your shading and is it going to be the color that you want, is it too dark is it too light. Something else to keep in mind with your leather dyes, the leather dyes will fade over time. There's a couple of things that you can do to try to prevent that, one being do your acrylic sealant once your project is done. But they still, even with that, the leather dyes will tend to fade over time. The wood stains last a little bit longer and they've got a product out there now called a gourd ink dye that is more color fast. So, you can again, go very, very simple with your just basic acrylic paints and magic markers. Leather dyes, these come about four, four-fifty a bottle,lot of different colors. Wood stains you might actually have laying around the house, show polish you might actually have lying around the house, so lots of different options to actually getting some color on your gourd."