Painting Pots!

This week we have been experimenting with all things paper! We love a good bit of scratch art here, and we love an excuse to paint a Greek pot – so we thought we’d have a go at making our own scratch art paper. It’s simple to do and the results are surprisingly pleasing. We had everything we needed in the house already, so it made for a nice (inexpensive!) way to spend a couple of hours – much needed by this point in the summer holidays!

You will need:
Paper
Crayons
Black Paint
Washing up liquid
Paintbrushes
Toothpicks or scratch art pencil

Step 1: Outline
Draw the outline of your pot on paper using a crayon. I went a bit rogue with a calyx krater but you can choose any shape you like. Perhaps you’ve visited a museum recently and seen some good examples? There’s also lots of useful reference images online if you want some inspiration. Don’t worry if it’s a bit wonky like mine, you’ll be painting over it anyway!

Step 2: Colour
Now for the important bit – the colour underneath! Lots of Greek pots
were made in the red-figure style, which looks like the picture below:

You can see there is an orange-coloured figure against a black background. This is what I’m going to try to recreate with mine, so I’ll need a strong orange background. But you can test out different colours depending on what colour you want your figures to be when you scratch away your black layer – the 6yo chose a rainbow background for his!

Step 3: Paint
Next is the fun part: it’s time to cover your pot with the black paint. We mixed a little bit of washing up liquid into our paint to make it a bit thicker – it also made it smell v nice! Make sure you cover all the coloured areas with the paint so that none of the orange shows through anymore. You might need to do two coats if your paint is a bit runny. Set aside to dry!

Step 4: Scratch
Once your vase has dried completely, it’s time to get scratching! Using a toothpick or a scratch art pen, add your design. The black paint should scrape away, showing your lovely colours underneath!

Greek pots were often covered with scenes from famous stories, and potters liked to add lots of different shapes around their main design as decoration too. Pick a favourite hero, monster, story – whatever you like! We’ve been enjoying the stories from Odysseus’ travels lately, so I picked a Siren for my vase. She’s singing her song to lure Odysseus towards the rocks, though I’m not sure it will work…