Let's learn how to turn your own illustrative designs into handmade, hand painted clay pins! I will guide you through the entire process from transferring your designs to clay, sanding, priming, painting and applying a UV resin coat in the end to make them strong enough to last a lifetime.

Lesson 1: In this lesson you will choose which of your designs you would like to make into a clay pin. You are welcome to choose one or many! Start with just a sketch or a completed drawing, it doesn’t matter. We will discuss appropriate sizing for brooches and make our “patterns” to use to transfer our designs to clay.

Lesson 2: Here we will focus on transferring our designs to the clay and cutting out our base shapes while learning about some of the properties of air dry clay. At the end of this lesson you should have your pieces cut from the clay and sitting to air dry for 24-48 hours.

Lesson 3: This lesson picks up after the clay has dried and we will discuss and work on both sanding and tooling the clay to get a smooth finish, but we will also discuss how to patch divots and correct other mistakes.

Lesson 4: The focus of this lesson will be on priming all of your pieces with gesso so they will be ready to take paint in the next lesson. We will discuss getting the right consistency of your gesso for the smoothest finish possible.

Lesson 5: Here we begin applying the base colors for your pieces. We will go over the different kinds of paints you can use and what consistency to dilute your paints for a smooth finish VS a gloomy brush stroke ridden finish.

Lesson 6: After the base colors have dried we will begin applying aloof our detail coloring and the pins will finally start to come to life. I will show you how I create test swatches before committing to color combos as well as go over ineffective and effective ways to layer gouache paints.

Lesson 7: Now that your pieces are all painted we will touch up the backs with titanium white and prepare to apply UV resin to the tops of the pins. If you are unfamiliar with UV resin, do not worry as I will guide you through the entire process. At the end of this lesson we will be letting the resin coated pins rest and sit in sunlight for a good 12 hours.

Lesson 8: After our pins have rested for a day, we are now able to paint the sides of the piece with the UV resin. This process can be rather tedious so you may want to cue up an audio book or video while you work. After the sides of the pins have had a 12 minute cure time, then it is time to flip them over, sign them if desired, and apply the resin and brooch clips to the back. You may also want to leave the backs to rest and sit in the sun for another 12 hours afterwards.

By this time you should have completed your first handmade clay pins! So give yourself a big pat on the back for sticking it out! It takes a lot of effort to create things from scratch and you should be proud of yourself. :D Don't forget to upload your finished projects to the project gallery, I would love to see what you all make!

Carmina Watson

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