A Painted Skull

My birthday was just over a week ago, and sister #1 had planned...Activities.

I didn't know what those activities were until she turned up on my birthday and told me we were going to paint pottery!
...which looks so unexciting in writing, but when your options include skulls and wall-mounted shark heads, that's...well, exciting, isn't it!

If the title of this post didn't make it obvious, my sister and I both opted for skulls! 

Here we are smiling like dorks, with the designs pencilled onto our skulls. The pencil marks burn off in the kiln, so it didn't matter if either of us made a mistake with the pencil, or a whole mess of things (which I did).

Once we'd finished our designs, it was on to choosing colours and getting to the actual painting! This was the most time-consuming part, in which I really began to regret drawing on so much detail.

The paints used are actually liquid glass, and need two coats to get a deeper colour. Helpfully, the shelves of paints have tiles that demonstrate the depth of colour for one/two coats, sponged on, etc.

This is especially helpful as the colours become so much more vibrant once fired and glazed!
Here's our finished skulls:

My sister used a lot of tattoo-inspired details in her design, and opted for different symbols and images all over, rather than trying to make it symmetrical. I think this turned out really awesomely!

The zillion details I put onto mine showed up even more after firing, though I'm not sure that it came out as well as my sister's did. I should have kept it simpler!
However, I'm pleased with the overall effect.

This is what our skulls look like from the back. The lady in the shop (Vicky, I think it was--I'm terrible with names!) advised us to stick to a big design on the back of them, as the back is rarely seen. She had some great examples in the shop, and was clearly really knowledgeable, not to mention helpful and chatty! 

By the way, if you're wondering about the hole in the back of the skull, they were apparently originally intended as light fittings! A skull light would look awesome, wouldn't it?

Here's one last picture of the skull I painted, in its new home!

We painted at Paint Pots in Brighton, which requires advance booking and has a huge number of different items to paint. They also do baby footprints, which seemed to be a popular thing as loads of people came in for that whilst we were there!

My sister and I ended up spending over five hours working on these, but the time really flew by, and it was great to spend the day focusing on something creative! Thank you, Paint Pots, and of course, thank you very much, sister #1!