Louise is one of the design students that spent their work placement with me in 2011. Whilst here, Louise wrote a blog post about some plates that she had admired at RE a wonderful shop in Corbridge, Northumberland.
Because she was inspired by her visit to RE I taught her how to stencil porcelain and ceramic. We used china paints that can be fired in a domestic oven to achieve a dishwasher safe finish. We were about to host a Christmas open evening at The Stencil Library so Louise chose a reindeer stencil to decorate two plates that would carry the festive pastries.
Here she is creating her stencilled festive plates. We used paints from Pebeo and Liquitex. The paint was stencilled onto the plates using a dense foam sponge. Gather the sponge into a ball shape take a little of the paint onto the sponge then dab it onto paper or a spare plate.
The result is to get an even, moist application of colour through the stencil without the paint bleeding under the design.
If that should happen clean up by gently scraping the smudges away.
The plate must be scrupulously clean before stencilling it. Louise stencilled the reindeer onto both patterned and plain plates.
She used Pebeo paint onto one plate and Liquitex on the other. Both were red paints. I put them into my cooking range to fire over our lunch hour. Once they had cooled Louise put the reindeer stencil back into place and overlaid a Moroccan tile stencil over it.
She stencilled the overlay with gold paint and we put them back into the oven. Unfortunately I forgot about them. It was a couple of days before I opened the range door and discovered two very hot plates! The red Pebeo paint had gone a strange brown colour, both my mother and my husband tried to scrub the plate mistaking the reindeer design for a brown sauce stain. I apologise to both of them, also to Louise and Pebeo.
The other plate is looking fine though and it is a testament to the longevity of both paints that I can not remove either of the patterns.
The pattern on my kitchen work surface is the same pattern stencilled in gold over the reindeer.
In the San Antonio Express, Molly Glentzer writes about my new book Stencil It and the new one from Ed Roth. Molly is explaining how she decorated a plate using a stencil. I would not have used marker pens and would not have relied on spray adhesive to stop the paint running as Molly did but she made a good job of it and the result looks great.
Want to have a go? There is a project in the Stencil It book which explains with photographs how to stencil ceramic tiles using a sponge, oven fired china paints... and a free stencil of a fish.
Helen.
