Colors for Clay Mushroom Incense Burner

Series Summary

An incense burner is not a particularly sophisticated device. You need a hole for the stick of incense, and perhaps a tray to collect the ashes, and that’s it. In fact, many otherwise worthless and pointless ceramic works have found renewed meaning and extended lives as incense burners. Put a hole in the head of a smirking dragon or the backside of a scowling gnome and they suddenly become functional works of art. But this series does not focus on recycling old figurines, rather it concerns creating your own work of art from scratch. The clay mushroom incense burner is a statement about you, your craft skills and your determination to live a free and easy lifestyle clear of the dominating influence of THE SYSTEM.

In this free series of hippie craft videos, our ceramics expert Melina Piroso demonstrates how to make your very own mushroom incense burner, complete with butterfly and bright green plot of grass (no, not that kind). Melina shows you how to choose the right colors for your new work of art, then guides you through the process of molding the separate components, then combining, decorating and ultimately cooking them before arriving at your delightful finished product. Bring on the bad smells!

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Melina and welcome to Expert Village. Today we are going to make a beautiful mushroom and butterfly incense burner out of polymer clay. The first step is to select the colors that you would like to use. So you are going to calculate that we are going to make a mushroom and we are going to make a little butterfly on top of the mushroom. We are going to have some grass growing along the bottom. So we are going to take some green that we are going to use for the grass. We are going to go ahead and make the classic red mushrooms with yellow dots so we are going to take some red and we are going to take some yellow. Then we are going to make our butterfly shades of blue. So we are going to take some white and we are going to take some blue and we are going to mix it together to make the butterfly shape. Then we are going to take some black for the butterflies eyes and body. We are going to take some white to mix with the body."