How To Paint A Ceramic Ornament

1. Ornaments Introduction: Hello to you. I'm so excited you're here today for this very fun and I hope incredibly inspiring class. Today, you'll be learning how to design a beautiful ceramic heart ornament. These are perfect for gifts, keepsakes, or just a lovely piece of art to brighten up your space. Whether you're a beginner or you might consider your skill set to be more in the intermediate range, the techniques you'll learn here today will help elevate your craft and invite an elegant touch into your artistry. For several years now, I've been approached about my process painting on ceramic surfaces, most especially ornaments, although there has been a significant interest in other decorative wares as well. Since 2018, I have had the honor and privilege of creating over 3,500 ornaments for private clients, retailers, and other special events. Although this process has served to create a livelihood, it has come to mean so much more to me. In June of 2024, for the first time I sat down to create my very first master class in which I invited students into my studio to learn this joyous process. Provided in that course is an immersive comprehensive experience in which I pull back the curtain and reveal every detail that has led to my success painting on ornaments. I keep no trade secrets for myself. It's everything I know and that I've learned. The journey to get here today, it was neither easy nor seamless. In truth, it was years of frustration and trial and error, costing both money and lots of time. And being a mom of two under three, I did not have a whole lot of the latter. Oftentimes, I wanted to give up and just throw in the towel, but I didn't. I'm so glad because had I, I would have deprived myself the opportunity to have created thousands of treasures for people all over the world, and I wouldn't be here sharing this joyous process with you. So with that said, if you are here with interest and intrigue surrounding painting on ornaments, you are absolutely in the right place. Today's lesson will offer a sneak peek into my immersive master class. And while some of the supplies and education has been modified to protect the investment of my current master class students, by the end of our time together, you will have learned everything you need to know to create this darling ornament. If during our time together, you should find that your curiosity was further peaked, then I would love for you to consider joining me for the master class, which was designed expressly for expediting the learning process and shaving years of frustrating trial and error off this process of this beloved and timeless trade. We're painting on ornaments, but it's really so much more than that. I'm going to show you how you can paint on any three dimensional surface using the same process taught in the master class. I have students successfully painting on hand painted candles. Something like this, creating custom tumblers for high end clients, along with decorative wares to launch during seasonal collections. But let's just take it one step at a time. I'm so excited you're here for this class, and so without further ado, let's begin. 2. Discussing Supplies: Let's go ahead and run through the supplies that we will need to complete this project. The differences will be the ornament source and the base coat. But we've found something that is wonderful to work with. So I don't think you're going to be disappointed there at all. Let's start with our brushes here. I'm not going to be a stickler with the brushes, only because we're not using anything like, you know, a quill or a dagger strip or any of those specialty brushes. What I really need you to have is a variety of small fiilberts and small rounds. Nothing bigger than an eight. This is the velvet touch series, all of these in Burgundy, except for the little small one here. This is the heritage round. Like I said, nothing bigger than an eight Filbert, and then some sixes and fours, and then we have a size two in the Mini detailer series, which is one of my favorite brushes. And then we also have a number four in the Mini detailer series. Again, this is a brush actually that I just began using recently, and it is, by and large, one of my favorite brushes. It has such a nice, fine point to it, so I think you are going to truly enjoy using it. We're going to be able to get some nice slender lines, which is something my students are consistently telling me that they struggle with. So I will show you how we use this brush in order to do that. Um, additionally, you're going to need some water and a palette, your ceramic bisqu ornaments. So the link that I've provided in the outline is going to take you to Amazon. You shouldn't have any problems, those of you who are in the United States, getting access to these. However, I know I have quite an international student base. So if there are any issues, please reach out to me. Really, any ceramic Bisk is going to do. So there are tons of ceramic bisque manufacturers located all over the world. A simple Google search will yield several results. It'll just be a matter of finding something that you want to work with. These are a flat ornament. I mean, they're a tiny bit three dimensional here. I would say no more than a half an inch, but they're flat. This will be a little bit easier to work with than my truly three dimensional ornaments that are round and icicle and acorn shaped, and then the hearts as well. Then we're also going to be using our acryl gouache here. We're going to be using some pale peach, ash green, shell pink, lilac, and olive. Um, you're going to need some scissors just to cut off any ribbon that has come with your ornaments. Chances are that it's not going to be a very high quality ribbon just because they are making these items in bulk. So go ahead and just snip that off. We're going to replace with, really just ribbon of your choice. I don't give out my ribbon manufacturer either, because then we have a bunch of ornaments that have the same exact ribbon 3. Swatching The Design Paints: Okay, so you should have your 140 pound cold press paper or something comparable out in front of you. Before we dive in, I am going to mention that because there is quite a fair amount of interest surrounding ornament painting, I'm wagering there's going to be probably some new people here, welcome, and maybe some that have not taken previous classes of mine before, so I'm going to do my very best not to assume that you know all of the little tips and tricks that I've taught students that have been following me for years or who have taken my previous classes. However, if there are questions following the class that I did not address or something was not clear enough, you are always more than welcome to use the skill share forum discussion question area. I try and pop on there every couple of days or so and answer questions, and that way I can help clarify things for you. I don't want anyone to be in the dark. Anyway, just that little note before we begin, you can see here that I have beautifully mapped out our palette here and then of course, took my palm and ran it through my beautiful, uh, all of tone here and my ash green. Anyway, we're going to redo it anyway. I have a scratch piece of paper here. Palette is something that is key and truly important when painting, and it's not a step to be skipped or missed. I think oftentimes we're so excited to get to the actual painting itself that we just say, Well, all these colors look pretty together, it's going to be great and that could be true. And you may even have a palette already in mind, something pinned from Pintrs, but that is not going to guarantee that it's going to work on whatever surface it is that you're using, whether that be paper or ceramic or glass or wood. And so whenever you are, you know, putting together a design, do take the two to 5 minutes to, you know, get your colors out and put them on the actual surface of what it is that you're going to be painting. Obviously, we're going to be painting a ceramic bisque ornament, and so it's going to look a little bit different. But once we have our colors mapped out here, we're going to mix up a little bit of the base coat and we're going to make a little swatch here, and then you'll be able to see how these colors are going to look together. All right. So if you haven't already, go ahead and get out your acrylic wash in all five colors that we're using at this point and remove the top of them. Now, there's going to be a little bit of time here where we make a stroke, and then we need to rinse off our brush. I'm just going to time lapse all of that, so you're not sitting there waiting for me to thoroughly rinse my brush and wipe all the excess color. But you do want to make sure that if you're not using five separate brushes, you are rinsing your brush thoroughly between, um, between applying a new color to the brush or else it is going to compromise the integrity of the color and you won't know exactly what it is that you're working with. Let's go ahead and pull out our palette here and let's just begin mapping out our palette. This is shell pink. This is all of make sure to leave a little bit of room in between each color so that you have room to mix because we are going to be doing pretty good amount of that. This is pale peach. This is lilac, and this is ash green. Now, please note that if you are not using a wet palette, acrylic gouache because it is acrylic paint and it's not water based paint, such as watercolor and straight guash will dry. You are working with a limited amount of time here, which just adds an extra layer of complexity to the overall craft project. If you have a wet palette, the colors will stay preserved quite a bit longer. I don't tend to work with those very often, but you can put a wet paper towel on the bottom of a tray and then you can dab the colors out and then they'll stay moist for you. I'm working in pretty cold conditions right now. I'm in my studio, and if you're joining me real time, it's February. In fact, it's raining outside, so there's not a lot of dry or heat in the air, and so I'm going to just leave these as is, but that is a note for the future. If you're working in a hot environment or it's just particularly dry, a wet palette could be extremely useful. Okay, so we'll push those colors off to the side. Now, mixing your paint with water is going to be the entire project. Paint to water ratio decides everything, and it's something that I expand upon thoroughly in the master class because in order to I mean, we obviously want to get to a point where we're somewhat here. We're getting the proper strokes. It's not too dry and it's not over moistened. So in order to get to that final result, we have to understand how much water is necessary to add to the paint to get the desired consistency, and we also need to be able to observe our brush and know what we're looking for before we apply the stroke. Okay, so we're going to go over that a little bit in a condensed sort of format, and you'll be able to see what it is that I'm doing and how that applies to the paper. But again, when we transfer this process onto ceramic bisqus a different surface. However, that said, I tried to pick something that was similar. You can see this is actually a smoother texture than the watercolor paper. But this is porous and so it soaks up. So it's really actually a very similar surface that we're working with. Okay? All right, so I'm going to be using my number six brush or excuse me, my number eight brush just to swatch out all of these colors here. A nice big brush so you can see how the colors work together. All right. I am going to wet my brush here and wipe off the excess here and wet it one more time, and then head in, you can see that it is fairly moist and then I'm going to just keep applying the paint until I have a fair amount of paint on my brush as shown, and then I'm going to make a nice generous stroke here. I'm going to rinse off and then we'll come back and do that again. Dipping into the olive here, moistening it slightly, adding a touch more water because it's not quite diluted enough. You're also going to note that there is a shear factor in these colors, not specific to this brand. It's just with all paints, there's different compounds making up each color and sometimes the color that's used or excuse me, the compound that's used to create the color just has more of a shear quality like this shell pink. I have to use more of the paint and less water in order to get the stroke I want. With the olive, it's much more rich. I need less water or excuse me, more water and less paint. So it's the opposite. And this is something you really only learn by experience, just by practicing, exploring, understanding your paint to water consistency. Instead here I'm showing you what to look for on your brush. You don't want to have it bubbled up so much that the paint is just sitting on the brush, you want it to have a nice glazed layer for this consistency. If we were to add a little bit of water to it, make it more of a 50% paint, 50% water, it would look like this. Then if we were to do that, again, making it more of a 70 30, That's pretty similar. I think I still have too much paint. You can see that there is a little bit of a difference here, but I have quite a bit of paint. We'll just map out this color. Then as we remove the paint, we have less and less. This shows the gamut. This is pretty much just a little bit of water and paint. This is adding about 20% water and then 30% water, 40% water, 50%, 60 and onward. Consistency, as I've already mentioned, and I do just want to stress it is so important. We would never use these consistencies when painting on ceramic s because it's way too porous. We're really only ever going to use this is our lightest consistency, and this will be our heaviest consistency. Just doing the same thing with our shell pink, rinse off most of my olive here so I can be sure that I'm getting a true shell pink. Adding a bit more water to it. And you really it's one of those things that you kind of have to look closely to be able to see. It's not quite so opaque. And that's really what acrylic paint is. It's opaque. It lacks the transparency that watercolor and gouache have. All right. And then adding just a touch more. There we go. Okay. I'm going to rinse off here and then I'm going to pick up my peel peach. I would rather be over thorough here than less so and just assume that you know all of these things. Okay. So here is our ape peach. Then You can see I still had a little bit of the gold here, so I'm going to take a moment to thoroughly rinse and then we'll come back and do the lilac. Okay. Adding a bit more water here. Here's your brush. Nice opaque stroke. Now, if you were to not add enough water, just to show you what that would look like. It would look something like this. You have these striations through the paint because you don't have enough water, and that's what's called a dry stroke, which when used properly can be a really beautiful effect. But when we're painting on the ornament, we want to make sure that what's loaded is a proper consistency to meet the ceramic bisqus specific needs. And adding a bit of water to it. And even more water to it just so you can see blotting off. It can be used like a straight guash, but it's just a bit more tricky because it dries a lot quicker. Then let me skip that lilac here. Let me show you that as well. Okay. There we have the design paints that we're going to be using. Now we're going to mix up the base cooat paint in the next module here and you'll be able to see how all of these colors are going to work together. 4. Swatching The Acrylic Paint: If you have not already, give your paints a nice shake. The contents can settle at the bottom, and then what you get on top is paint juice instead of the actual paint. Give them a good shake. We're going to be using this teal C and olive green. We're going to mix these two together to get a really pretty what myo color is actually now that I'm seeing that. Go ahead and put a little bit on your palette And then make sure that your brush is thoroughly rinsed. You may even need to change your water cup if things have gotten a little bit muddy, but this is quite a dark color, so we shouldn't have any issues there. All right, so we're going to go ahead and mix these two colors together. You're going to see as we move through each module that the lead up to actually painting is more important than the actual painting itself because we can learn these techniques. Anyone that has the time and the inclination to get better at their skill can get better at their skill. But if the foundation of the skill isn't completely learned, it means that every step from there on after is going to be compromised. Because the foundation wasn't learned. I always try and stress to my students and not stress. I don't ever want my students to be stressed. Emphasize the importance of slowing down, taking the necessary time to really learning how to mix, paint, how much water to add because I mean, we really can't break down these tiny metrics. It's a fingertip of water, a teaspoon, there are things that are hard to put language to. You have to feel it with your brush and see it on the palette. Let's continue mixing here. Do we have a nice block of color. You can see this is going to be such a fresh, beautiful spring design, it could even be used. If you wanted to do easter eggs later on down the road. This would be a fun color to use. Okay. I'm put that off to the side, and then what we're going to do is just make a nice little square here so we can see how it's all going to work together. I'm going to mix this so that it's pretty opaque and there's not a lot of transparency happening. Okay. Just make sure your brush doesn't have significant globs of one color or the other, really rotate the bristles back and forth. Okay. And then we're just going to fill in with our color here. And we still see a little bit of transparency, but this will give us a pretty good idea. But All right. Okay, so we have our teal base coat. Now, you can see that this ash green is looking pretty close to this color. So we're going to need to lighten it with something. I'm probably going to add another color. Actually, I know I'm going to add another color. Now, what we could do if you just wanted to stay with these five colors, a little side note behind that. I know not everybody uses acrylic gouache and these tubes, while not overly expensive, they do cost about $7, seven times $535. That might be a lot to stretch someone's budget. I tried to keep it to five colors. Um and colors that can overlap and be used and mix to make different colors. But if this is something you love and especially, of course, if you decide to join me for the master class, then you're going to need to make a certain investment in your paints and in your brushes. But I'm going to probably just use a white. Hopefully, everybody has a white already, but it's just a great color to have then we'll lighten this so that it shows up more significantly on our dark teal here. We don't want things to blend in so perfectly and just a little tip when I am working on a design, I decide whether or not I'm working light or I'm working dark because I've noted that when I go medium, whether it be a light base or a dark base, the designs just don't pop the way that I want them to, the way I expect things to be just vibrant and rich. And so if I'm using, let's say, just a really light mint green, that means I'm going to paint dark. I'm not even going to paint medium. I'm going to paint dark. There might be some light aspects, but these are just sort of extra on top the main flower itself unless it's white, which looks great on everything is going to be of a darker shade. Opposite for when I'm painting dark, everything's going to be a pretty light shade. So just a little um, understanding behind the process. All right. Now we've seen how this is all going to work together. We are going to practice strokes on a separate piece of paper to just build up the mechanics, and then we will apply the base cooat and begin working on ornament. Please join me in the next segment. 5. Practicing Pinwheel Flowers: You can see, I've practiced some design elements on the piece of paper already just to get a feel for how the paint is going to lay and color compatibility. What's going to be key here is painting to size. When we paint on paper, I think just naturally unless we are a miniature painter of things, not many of us are, the tendency is to go big, so you can see here even with the design elements, these are quite large when we go to put them on, you know, our little heart here. So it's going to be very important that we are scaling. Now, you can see here this is quite big. This wouldn't even fit on there. We wouldn't even get a whole one. But the flower I picked today is going to be compatible to the size as well. We're going to be doing. It's a wild flower. It's sort of stock meets delphinium. But it's just a beautiful cluster flower, which is the basic, um, the foundation of the flowers that I teach in my book and then also in several of my classes here on skill share. Then we're going to layer it to emphasize depth and just play with color. And then we'll add beautiful gestural stems to it and add some sweet little leaves, top it off with some details, and it all comes together really beautifully. But I just want you to keep in mind, and we'll do this together here is we're going to sort of paint just to get the feel for the brushes, feel for the paint, and then we're going to work on specifically painting small. That's why we're going to be using a variety of our small brushes. Okay. All right, so go ahead and put your ornament off to the sign. And also to preserve our paint, I'm just going to be using one color at a time. You don't need to put all of the paints on your palette. And if you haven't already, and there's been a pretty good amount of time, go ahead and wash your palette unless it's a wet palette because those paints are not going to be usable anymore. That's why we want to dab just a little bit at a time. We don't want to ever just squeeze out the paint. Again, just assuming that not everyone has worked with acrylic gouache and wanting to make this process just as stress free as possible for you. Okay, I'm going to be using my number four brush, which is just slightly bigger than my mini detailer to start with the base of the flower, our stock, which if you want to get inspiration for this class, normally, I walk my students through an inspirational segment. It's usually just three to 5 minutes where we look at the flower, note the things that are most prominent special that stand out to us, make notes of them, and then bring that experience into the actual design process. You can do that. But what we're doing here today is pretty gestural because it needs to in order to make sense on a small canvas. When we paint big, you know, we can do all sorts of things, but small, um, we really need to be mindful about the strokes we make or everything just looks like it was mashed together. All right. So I'm going to begin with my lilac here as I did over here on the left and just put a small amount here on my palette. And then using my number four brush, again, we're going to wet and you can see it pooling here and now we're going to draw out a bit more paint in order to get that proper consistency. If you need to prior to making your strokes, go ahead and take your brush and give it a little sample stroke here to make sure you're working with the right consistency. It should look like this. And so we're going to practice this cluster flower, which is comprised of either five, four, three, or two petals. If we're doing an open phase cluster, it's going to look like this. If we're missing a petal, it's here. If we're doing a sort of sideways flower, we have three petals there. Sometimes if I'm layering and loading up the flour to give it bulk, then I'll do just kind of a couple little strokes here to give it, like I said, more dimension and just a bit more bulk. We'll run through all of those together. Before I get started here, I just want to bring attention to the fact that this is where most students struggle. It's with the consistency, and it's with knowing what to look for on your brush. Sometimes the paint is going to end up super chunky and sometimes it's going to be way too thin. If you are in that boat, the paint if it's not looking like what I'm doing here, please just know that you are in really good company, especially if you are beginning or even if you're an intermediate student. This is hard. Painting on any surface is difficult. But then when we take it next level to the ornament, it's going to be hard. I'm hoping that by starting on paper here, this will sort of bridge the gap a little bit for you. But if acrylic gouache is a new medium for you, you're going to have to just take time, spend 30 minutes on a piece of paper really getting used to consistency. So I just say that in hopes of reassuring you. I don't want you to get frustrated and overwhelmed. I know that feeling when painting is supposed to be a source of joy and a source of something good in your life. I never want my classes to invoke um, any of those lesser base feelings, but I also do know that we need to be challenged in order to grow. Anyway, I usually put a little aramnologue into each of my classes, so thank you for that 45 seconds. Okay. Let's go ahead and just practice our five petal flower here taking a stroke. Can turn your paper if you need to. Something to this effect. Go ahead and do that again, making a five petal flower here. You also want to play with the amount of white space in the center. You don't want five flowers that look exactly like that. Even though they all have five petals, they can look a little bit different. We can start at a different angle and do something more like that where it looks as though it's on its side. Now we have a four petal cluster flower or excuse me. I keep saying cluster, it's a penwheel flower. That's what I refer to in my book Penhel and it makes for the cluster of flowers on the stem. This is what I call gestural form. We're not This one quite frankly, is just a little bit too much like, hello, I'm a pinwheel. We want to strive for something a little bit more loose when painting, and so that involves loosening our grip on the brush and just sitting back and not being so controlled, which can be difficult for many of us. Okay. So we've done our little four stroke here. Let's go ahead and practice a few three strokes. You might need to load your brush one more time. These you could layer behind one of your five stroke. Then we can do a couple two strokes as well. These are going to be, just what is peeking out from behind other flowers. C even layer a couple there. Okay. So this should give you a pretty good sense of that whole, you know, pinwheel flower shape. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to take a little bit of our shell pink. And we're going to mix this first with the lilac in order to get a color in between these two colors. So just bring a little bit into the center here. And then we need to add a touch of water as well. Okay. You can see we have a nice little middle ground color. And now we're going to layer over not completely cover, but layer over the flowers we've already made. Now the palette, this color looks great, but on paper, it's not quite working. Now when we move to paint on our block, it may work better, but I'm actually going to add a bit more shell pink and I did that in the first when I was exploring over here. I wanted to show you sometimes what works on the palette is not what's going to actually work on what you're painting. There we go. Slightly lighter. And we're gonna make those same strokes again. Nice little gestural flat medium pressure strokes. They really are as simple as just applying a little bit of pressure to the paper and rotating your wrist and the brush with it. Always feel free to take as much time as you need to explore different shapes. You can see we're building up the depth here. Adding a bit more water. And now I'm going to go full in to the pink to get one more layer of color. Then as we build up a cluster, and this is more like a square block of flowers, we're going to get to the top and we're going to need some smaller petals. That's when we're going to pick up our mini detailer brush and our shell pink. Mine still has a bit of the olive on it, excuse me a moment while I rinse off all the color, and then I need a little bit more of my shell. And this brush makes the sweetest strokes. I can see here just using the same concept. It really makes some beautiful strokes. And you can go teeny, teeny, tiny, itty itty bitty. Or you can go pretty generous. Quite a variation between those two, right? Now you see why it's one of my favorite brushes. All right. So as we near the top, we're going to begin to make some smaller flowers. Ba the idea is that, we're building on this. We have something that's bulky towards the bottom, middle, and then at the top, it extends into a delicate tip. You can just practice this shape, three petals, four petals, even five petals, if you like. Then as we get to the very top, we're going to just begin to press the tip of the brush down to create this shape, which is one of my favorite shapes. This just acts as intimating towards there being some small flowers, some small buds. Later on, we can attach the stems, make a really slender line here to attach some of these smaller elements. But it's just to note, okay, something's happening here off to the side or not off to the side at the exterior of the flower. It's not a full flower, it's a bud, it's anything. It's just gesturing. It's one of my favorite ways to cap off a flower here. You get the idea. This would be such a pretty surface pattern too, if you were to just spread out all of these different shapes, layer them in different colors. Then you can see here I did the same thing. I won't do that here because it's just the same thing that we did here in the yellow. This is going to be the same stroke for the center of our flowers. If we want to add a bit of olive to the center of these flowers here, then we can do that. Get out the olive. Adding just a bit of water, and then we can give our flowers just a bit of a push there. You don't have to do it on all the flowers. You can be selective. Again, there's a little bit too much space in between what's going on here. This is just I don't want you to try and form anything yet. That's when the perfectionistic tendency starts to come in and we get all concerned about how it's looking, and then our attention is drawn away from just learning the mechanics. By practicing in this manner, we do ourselves a huge service by focusing on one part of the process at a. Okay. So we have a few more center details here, and it really just brings a bit of clarity to the design because we are working gesturally here. Okay, so that's going to be it. I say it because that's a lot. It seems very simple because it's just repeating the same stroke, but it involves a ton of wrist mobility. It involves proper paint to water consistency, and it involves knowing how to layer. So it looks very simple when, you know, you're talking about, okay, this is step one, step two, and step three. But as you combine it all together, it gets exponentially more complicated. So what you're doing here in case no one has told you yet is beautifully big work. 6. Practicing Leaves & Stems: Alright, go ahead and get out your ash green and put a little bit on the palette here. And then, as I mentioned, we're gonna be adding a bit of white to it. So let's go ahead and just practice that now. Sometimes with this paint, too, you have to squeeze a couple times because the paint will dry on the entrance here to the tube. And so in order to get a nice clean daub, you just have to squeeze a couple times. This has way too much sediment in it from how it was dried. Little things nobody ever tells you. And then you end up painting with it and you have all of these little bumps in your paint. It's very overwhelming. And it just stops the flow of the process, which is so important when painting to just feel like it has a seamlessness to it. I think overall, you know, when I was sharing with people about the master class and what I was offering, in essence, it's a streamlined process. If you've heard me speak about learning how to paint on ornaments, you'll know that it was very hard won. It took me years and years to perfect the process and a lot of broken ornaments. I won't name names, but maybe somebody threw a couple of them as well. So it required me to continue coming back to it again and again, trying new things, you just refining the skills that I had learned and, you know, developing new ones and being able to put all of that um, you know, into one course and launch that as a whole and give people years of information and expertise and put that into 7 hours was it was really therapeutic for me because it really was such a stilted process. If you know um, if you're an artist and you've worked on something and you've had to just put it down because you've gotten to the point where you almost hate what you're doing, and then you have to come back. And so it really was just a stop and start for so many years, and I'm so glad I stuck with it because it was worth it and painting on, you know, ornaments and really so many different decor items is one of my most favorite things that I do. I probably do it at least half the year, if not more. Paper has become sort of the secondary canvas and medium for me these days. Okay, so we're going to be using our number four in the mini detailer, and go ahead and dip that into your ash green and pick up a bit of the white and mix that together. We may need to add more white when it comes time to paint on our ornament, but this will give us an idea of how to blend, making sure we're rotating the bristles back and forth to get a nice clean application. Okay, so let's practice grazing the paper because again, this is one of the things that my students tell me they struggle with is their strokes are really chunky. Again, because we're painting small here, we have to keep in mind scale. But just to get a feel for how this brush works on the paper, you can even use a scratch piece of paper, if you don't want to mess up something that you have going, we're going to take the tip and we're just going to work our way from top to bottom, but we're going to bring a curve into the stroke. We'll start here at the top. And we have something that's like that. Now, the lines that are really thin as we get to the base here, those are very difficult to achieve. Is it needs to be second nature and familiarity. What ends up happening is oftentimes people are going so slow that it ends up looking like that. It really is just a quick little swoop and it all comes together. But again, it has to be practiced and reinforced. Just practice that slightly to the side making different different thicknesses. You can try and go as thin as you can. Because we're really going to need those thin lines when we go to paint on the ornament. And then practice gathering them into, you know, an assemblance of a stem. So we're just taking our brush, our wrist, moving it back and forth to get the optimal angle and adding a bit of curvature to give it that gestural feel. If we did that, adding to our little cluster here, start somewhere around there. It doesn't have to touch the flower. You can leave some room here or you can draw it all the way up to the top. And then adding a bit of curvature. So sweet little leaves here. This really helps to give our design more of that clarity I was talking about, and then we can run a few strokes through the center as well. If you plan on adding little lines to these tiny little dots, just be sure that you've practiced getting that sense of that really delicate tiny stroke, and then you can connect those. It looks really cute, but really quickly it ends up like this. You can turn that into something. I don't want you to be scared to make an ugly stroke that is the opposite of painting. I just want you to be comfortable. If you were to make a stroke like that, you could just add a little bit of pressure and turn it into a leaf and then add another leaf there. There's always ways to save it, and then if you wanted, you can add a little step. We've got a sense for how it's going to come together here at the base, adding a bit of curvature, and then we can add some thicker leaves too. Okay. Again, just practicing that compound stroke here that'll give us a bit more depth and just get really familiar with how it all feels in your hand and grazing the paper. Then once you're comfortable with that, we're going to do our smaller leaves, which were practiced over here. That's just a matter of taking your brush and moving it horizontally and you're going to start with light pressure and then build on the pressure to create a thicker stroke as you finish. Tip and then you can round it off a little bit if you like. But even just a one stroke works really well. You can move your paper as needed. Add a bit more water. Don't be afraid of different leaf shapes. You can add little stems to them if you like, but you don't have to because they're just going to be poking out from behind the stalk. There you go. There's some small ones. Remember, this is our scale, so this will work. But these are really nice too in order to get something detailed. Practice little tiny leaves and then practice some bigger ones. They're all needed practice making some little lines. You could even take some leaves here and just make a cute little shape with the leaves. It can be more surface pattern than true to nature. Then you can bring those in closer if you like, or you can let them hang out there on the side for a more gestural look. Either way is beautiful. It's just going to be what you gravitate towards. Then like I said, you can finish the stroke here and you can bring it all the way through when we see when we go to apply all of this onto the ceramic ornament, we're going to want to bring things through to a certain extent. So it's good to get familiar with making connections between elements. So, you might want to do a couple cluster or excuse me, pin well flowers and then take your brush and make a nice stroke and then do a stroke with curvature and then do a leaf stroke. Putting it all together. Don't be afraid to just play here. This is the time for you to just figure out what you like and how you want it to all lay out. Eventually, like I said, we're going to try and mold it into something more like this. But this is a really good reference point and just allows you to get really excited about the design aspect of this class in a friendly laid back nature. As soon as our brains tell us like, Okay, now it's real. Now we're really going for it. Then all of a sudden our old tendencies come back, we get locked up, we get tight and anxious, and we lose that aspect of just having fun and playing. So give yourself proper time to do all of that. That way when you do go for it for real, you feel ready and relaxed. All right, so that's really going to wrap up our time here on paper. We've done a lot. So once you're ready, once you've throughly practiced and just feel like you're ready to move into the next section, I invite you to join me as we apply the base coat to our ornament. 7. Applying The Base Coat: I think you're going to be amazed by how fast this part of the process is. Now, of course, the more we complicate the design, the more colors that we add, things take longer to mix the paint to clean brushes in between. We're using somewhat of a limited palette here, you know, and so it's not going to be quite as time consuming as it is when I'm creating ornaments for collection. But I think it's going to be laughable as opposed to the 45 minutes we've spent building up to this moment that lasts eight or 9 minutes. So it's just so interesting. I just reinforces what I've said about taking the time to really learn the foundation. That way, when we get to this point, it feels like we're ready for it and we're not working out all the bugs on the actual ornament. Now, that still happens and that still may happen and order in bulk is the link that I gave you, I think it's something like 12 ornaments. So don't be afraid. It's like $17. You're allowed to work through $17 worth of stuff and it all goes on the dumpster. That investment is completely worth your creativity and exploration. Okay? You know, in the master class, the ornament source I provide is very, very budget friendly. And I think that in itself is just a sigh of relief because if you mess one up, you're like, Oh, okay, no big deal. If anything, it's the loss of time. For me, when I was learning ornaments, I was a new mom. And so, you know, the time I would spend it felt so wasteful when I didn't have anything beautiful to show at the end of the day. I'm like, I didn't do anything. And, you know, I would just cry. But, you know, now, looking back, I realized that that was such sacred time. Learning the journey, all of it is what brought me here today. And it's, you know, what gave me my tenacity to keep going forward when things don't work and allows me to share that process with you. Okay, so if you haven't already, clear office space on your palette, go ahead and give your paints a shake. This is a different brush than I use in the master class, but it will work beautifully. This is just a flat brush. This again, it's Princeton, and it is a three fourths wash. Nice, thick amount of bristles here. You want something that's going to cover a fair amount of surface area. And I believe I did neglect to mention in the beginning that you would need a drop cloth. I'm hoping as you saw my setup here, you just instinctively put something down. But if you haven't already, go ahead and grab a drop cloth or a towel, anything that you're comfortable getting nice and dirty. Okay, because this is double sided, you want to make sure you get enough paint. Here's what happens if you don't. You have to mix another batch, and usually if you're mixing colors, you're never able to get it quite the right shape. So then you have to repaint the whole thing, which is fine. However, the more layers you add, the more thick that paint looks. Um, also, there is something that I have there's a process before we paint on ornaments that I have my master class students that I'm not showing here because it is an integral to the entire process and it's something that when I discovered that it was game changer for me. And so I'm wanting to protect the investment of those who have come alongside me in the master class. But again, I want this to be a truly enjoyable experience for you and I don't think you're going to have problems here. It's just just the ease in the master class is a little bit more comprehensive. All right, so we're going ahead and mixing your color together. So we have a nice blue and we want to make sure I guess turquoise, we have enough paint to paint both sides. You can see that I have a bit of green here on my brush, so just really be sure we are mixing things here very well. Nice little flat strokes here to work out all of that extra color. And then we can begin. Now, what I like to keep on hand is a little hair dryer to just quickly run over the ornament. However, because it's ceramic bisque and very porous, you're really not going to see that it takes forever to dry. But when we work with ornaments in the master class, it has a cap on it or at least a tip and so you can put your finger and then work from top to bottom. This one doesn't. I just paint one side, and then I dry it and then paint the other side, and then paint the sides. All right. There is something so gratifying about laying down a base coat and just watching something go from stark white to beautiful, vivid color. You want to make sure that you're doing a nice smooth application. If you have any bugs, gunk, you can just take your finger, run it through, and smooth it out. Okay, so there you go. Nice even coat. And then we will you can even move it past the bottom here and go around the side a little bit, and then I'm going to go ahead and dry this and then we'll come back into the other side. Okay, let's go ahead and repeat that process. Depending on how thick your coat is, you may need to dry it and then add another coat if you're seeing a lot of the color, the white primed bisqu before or excuse me, beneath. And just keep moving your brush around. All right. So now let's go ahead and do the sides. You just need a nice little light coat here as you're working around the perimeter. I like to get it all on, and then I can work on smoothing it out. I hold it in the middle in order to avoid touching wet paint, but it happens. So once I have that, then I just kind of rub a little, take a little bit of the paint, the excess, dry that so I'm not getting super chunky marks around. But you will need to go over it a few times, and you may need to dry in between as well. And blending those Or they will show up when you go to apply your design paints. Okay, so you're going to want to take a last and final look at your ornament, make sure that there are no white pockets because while you have the paint nice and wet on the palette, you want to be able to get to those. I've had to mix up paint after painting a design to fill in an area that either chipped or something happened to it, and it is not easy. It's very time consuming. So best to really closely observe now and then make those amendments and then wait till it's fully dry, and then we can begin with the designing. Okay, I will see you in the next segment where we begin to apply the design to our basecat. 8. Painting The Pinwheel Flowers: Again, we're just going to take one last look at our ornament to make sure everything looks as expected. If there are a few white ish, patchy areas just where it's slightly less saturated, not a big deal. We're going to cover this whole thing up and it's going to look great. Now, there is a bit of a difference between what is the back and the front, at least in this variety of ornament. So if you are looking at a different ornament, you're going to want to just kind of see, is there an obvious front or back. In this one, it's not so obvious, but this is the back because it's a bit more flat. This has a bit more of a puffy surface to it. So it's really slight. But after staring at these for so many years, I've come to discover that there is definitely a front on this one. So I'm going to paint it as shown. Also, you can do a double sided ornament when I paint ornaments, um, not usually in my Valentine's collection, but in my Christmas collection, for sure, I do a double sided, so you can do the same design on the other side, and that really makes for a nice comprehensive look. Alright, so really just going to be using the three brushes here. I like to have you guys have a variety just in case one is not behaving the way it's supposed to. That way you have a backup. But these are the three brushes that I'm going to be using here. Make sure your water is fresh if you have not recently, um, refilled it with some clean water, especially if it has turquoise in it. You don't want to pick up any of that pigment when painting. Make sure your palette is clean, free of dry paint. You don't want any of those extra little bits of dry paint to get into your fresh paint. All right. And then we're going to begin with our lilac here. And then also our shell pink. We're going to be mixing those two together. Remember to leave a little bit of space in between. You would be surprised how far you've seen me daub out three or four times now. I'm nowhere near using and this is probably one third of the way gone. Seems like we're using a lot each time, but I've done the math, and this is a great investment of paint. It lasts forever even having to throw a little bit away each time I use it. Okay, so I'm going to be using my number four brush. And again, we're going to be making those bigger clusters here at the bottom. Doing those variety of pinwheel flowers that I showed you, we're going to make sure that we leave enough room for some stemming here at the bottom, and to kind of go through all the way to the top, okay? And we want to, you know, one thing that I talked to my ornament master class students about is that we want to look at the shape of the ornament that we're working with and design in accordance to that shape. You know, basically, we don't want to paint things that are just kind of going diagonal, through the ornament and off to the side where it looks like almost like a mistake happened. We want to design in a way that just sort of fits the ornament. Not to say you cannot have elements that go off the side, that's fine, but you want to be mindful about the moments where you do that. And so it looks like it was an intentional part of your design. All right, so I'm going to get into my lilac here, add a little bit of water, and then mix in my shell pink because again, we're painting light. We're going to start here on the left and then work our way to the right so you can begin by making your sweet little pinwheel flower and turning your ornament as needed to get the best angle. Blot off a little bit here and continue building. A little bit of a different consistency here. I'm going to just go over that one more time and continue. I'm leaving some room in between to layer. We also want to leave some room along the sides to add a bit of the leaves and the stem. Okay, now that I have that bit of the formation here. I'm going to add just one more bit more paint here. This brush, I think, is on its last leg. I've used it. It was one of my favorites and now the bristles are starting to separate and so when I make a stroke, you can see in between the bristles. But when you have a brush that's just worked so well for so long and you just can't part, it's like a child. I can't throw you away. But I think we're just about there. Because it's just not performing the way that I need it to. All right. Now we're going to switch into our mini detailer, which is a fresher brush, and I think that's going to liven things up here. Taking the time to really mix the paint thoroughly at a touch of water. Then again, just looking at my brush, making sure that there's no globs and that I have just a nice coat of paint. You can see how different the strokes look there. They're nice and crisp, so we're just going to cover that up. Filling in some of the sparse area. And then we can begin making those sweet little gestural markings as we near the top and you can even extend them out to the side as well if you like. I'm going to leave some room in here to move into our next flower. That one I'm actually going to do in the straight lilac. We want to have color variation here. I've rinsed my brush heading back in with my mini detailer. Then we'll begin again right about here. Again, feel free to turn that ornament as needed. Continuing to just build the shape here, and then I'm going to leave enough room so that I can make some sweet little stems over here. I'm going to blot off. Then I'm going to get out my pale peach. Rinsing my brush in between, can see it's moving along pretty quickly. I obviously work with this medium a lot, so I'm going to go quicker. The steps might be a little bit slower as you're working, but you can see that most of that time was truly spent just learning how it all works together. Most of the time is not applying the strokes, but just getting the brush ready to apply the strokes. I talk about it and compare it to a face. You apply the foundation. I don't wear a foundation, but I hear that the foundation is very important, before you put the concealer on and then you do the bronzer and that's what shapes the face and contours it, and then you put on your blush and all of the other accessories. I'm a low maintenance girl. I hear. Same way with ornaments. All right. Remember to be loose with your shapes. They don't all need to look exactly the same or have the same sort of petal structure. Variety is beautiful. It Okay. I'm going to pause there. Actually, I'm going to do one more here just so that it looks like we have a bit of connection happening. Then I'm going to add a bit of white to our palette. I'm going to rinse my brush and then add a bit of the white to the lilac for that second layer. It's still a little too wet there, so I'll come back to that spot. And we'll finish here at the top with our sweet little shape. We'll need a bit more water because the shapes not coming out quite as smoothly. There we go. I We also want to make sure we leave some room for leaves and some overlapping. Then we're also going to mix our lilac with the white, some more, freshen it up if it needs a little bit. Then we'll bring it all together with one more layer on our pale peach and add those sweet little strokes. I'm going to add one over here. Just for fun. Just take a moment and look at your ornament and see how it's all shaping. If there feels like there's something that's not really moving in the right direction, you can continue to build upon it. I want this running into the ribbon here, so I'm just going to add a little bit more. Or where the ribbon is going to be. I like that there's a nice gap here for me to do some leaves. I like the symmetry of having these two stalks come up to the side here, but I feel like maybe this area just needs maybe one more, maybe one or two more flowers, just to give it a little bit more depth, and then I can come back to here. Yeah. That's better. You see how using these colors, it's only three colors, but when we mix them together, we can create a lot more and they look like three different varieties of the same flower. Okay. I'm going to pause there for now because I want to make sure that I'm leaving enough room for stems and leaves. The segment is getting a little bit long. I'm going to pause here and we'll come back and we'll finalize our design. 9. Painting the Leaves and Stems: For this next step, just like we did when we were practicing on paper, I'm going to be using my number for round from the mini detailer series, and I already have my ash grain here on the palette, so I'm just adding a bit of water to it, and then I'm going to take some white and I'm going to mix that because I want something lighter than what I have here. That color is just too close, and we're really not going to get that pop with the leaves that we want. Picking up more white and drying out my pile here. Now, again, it's going to be one of those times where you look at your brush, make sure that it's not overly loaded. You just want a nice soft glistening but make sure that all of the bristles are, in fact, covered in paint because you want those thin strokes. Now, if you want to practice that motion, just get it into move it from brain to hand to surface, then you may want to do that a couple of times on a scratch piece of paper that can be useful. And then when you're ready, you can head in. We're going to do alternating strokes where we use some of those long stems, and then we use those one stroke leaves as well. I'm going to start at the top and then work my way to the bottom. And I'm just gonna kind of let those leaves hang out. I'm going to bring a leaf up through here. Give it a little bit more curvature and you can see we're really working to the shape of the ornament. If you want to make some connections, you can. I'm going to opt to just leave it as it is for now. Then again, just finding those open spaces where I can make a few connections, actually, go over here too. That's always fun. Don't want to force it, if you don't see any open spots, no big deal. Perhaps I forgot to add some of my leaves over here too. Like I said, you can have it running off the side, that's fine. You're just wanting to choose your moments when you do that. Again, you can go for a surface pattern feel and not everything has to completely line up. You can have things overlapping or not making all of the connections. It's really entirely up to you. You can take a look at your ornament here and just ask yourself if it needs anything else in the way of stems and leaves. If it's too sparse in one area, you can add a little bit more. I'm pretty happy with the way that this is looking now. I think the only thing I'm going to add here is maybe just a leaf to kind of give a little bit more balance and symmetry to the design, um, and then maybe one more leaf over here. I'm really loving how this is all coming together. I'm going to push this down here and then we'll pick up a little bit of our green gold, live. Green gold is in watercolor. I'm used to teaching watercolor classes. We're going to use our mini detailer again, just make sure you're wiping off excess paint and then add a little bit of water to your palette. And then you're ready to add those gold embellishments. As I mentioned before, you do not need to add them to every single flower. You can be selective if you like. I'm pretty happy with that. I'm rinse off my brush here. Adding just a few, but adding just a few embellishments here, some lines to give it that gestural feel. 10. Sealing The Ornament: Okay, at this point, my ornament is fully dry. You want to be sure yours is as well. Giving it at least four or 5 hours to cure, even a full day would be best. I say this because the sealant that we're going to use, it definitely gets the job done. The downside of, I would say the Mj podge is that it does have a tendency, if not applied correctly to leave a tackiness to the ornament. It also which I think is a good thing, not the tackiness, but this next part, is that it lifts a little bit of the saturation out, so you can see on this side, it's just a little bit lighter where I haven't applied the mach podge. Then on the corner here, you can see that it's a little darker. It has a bit of a gloss, but it's mostly a matte finish. This is a really dry, no gloss, no luster whatsoever. This is going to be your mat, which is what I do recommend in my master class. I don't like that full gloss appearance. If you love that, then you can get this in a gloss finish. But Again, I feel like the mat offers just enough of a glossy surface so as not to just feel like it has no sort of shen, but it is a really just great middle ground. You're going to be using the same brush that we use to apply the base coat and you're going to squirt a little bit of this out on your palette. Then the key here is going to be quick strokes and even strokes. Making sure that your brush is ready. That means just shaping the bristles if there are any wonky bristles that are poking out in all sorts of areas and then just making sure it's not super wet. And then you're going to run your brush through the sealant, little bit of moisture here. And then we're actually going to do the back first. And although, just a note of reassurance here, even though it's showing up white, it will dry clear. Okay. So for this, you're going to make downward strokes just moving your way up and down horizontally, excuse me, vertically. If it's pulling at all, you're going to want to wipe off the excess paint on your drop cloth until you have a fully even coat. Again, sealants out of a tube are not my favorite, just because they require some extra care and multiple brushstrokes with an aerosol, all you're doing is standing back, making sure you're spraying an even coat. There's really only a few, you know, user guides that I pass along with that, but other than that, it's very simple and it is very comprehensive. It does the job well, and I've never had any complaints over the years. All right. So just making sure that your edges too have been um safely sealed 11. Adding The Ribbon: There you have it, your beautiful sealed ornament. Things are still drying, just a touch over here. But you can see there's just a slight little sheen to the ornament, but it's mostly a nice matte finish. We're going to go ahead and add the ribbon now. Like I said before, you are welcome to add any color, any texture of ribbon that you like. I like to use this cotton and it has a bit of a raw edge to it, which is fun, so I'm going to pop that in here. To get the ribbon through the hole, I have my very functional paper clip that I have unrolled, and it works great. I'm just going to push it through. You want to make sure that both sides are equal, and then you can do any assortment of knot that you like. I like to do just a simple knot in the middle and then pull it tight here so that it looks like that. Then you can do a double knot if you like. I'm just going to do the one and then we're going to tie it one more time. It's such a pretty color. I love this sort of ash rose. I have a paint in the acrylic wash that actually is very similar. And it's just such a it's a really pretty sort of neutral, but with a touch of a beige rose beige rose. It's a tonguetwister. Alright, then I'm just going to kind of work it out so that the ends are nice and straight. And there you have it. Our beautiful ornament. U 12. Thank You!: Again, I want to thank you so much for your time here today for allowing me to teach you a process that is so near and dear to my heart. I hope you too enjoyed your time and are inspired to continue exploring this creative medium. And please don't forget to upload your projects here on Skill Share and also tag me on social media. I would love to see your projects. All right, my friends, happy creating and until next time.