#cute projects

D.I.Y Ceramic Cups

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Hello,

so this will be a do it yourself entry for my blog. It’s almost Christmas so i thought I would throw in a project that some of you may want to try out if you like to make personal things for people. I actually made these for a friend who graduated Med school and had a house warming last summer. 

I thought i would share how I did it. the materials you need are:

1) Acrylic Paint set ( make sure it is oil based not water based)

2) Paint brushes set ( make sure the tips are of different sizes to make accurate brush strokes)

3) Porcelain cups- white / you can also use glass cups as well, i just chose porcelain cause it was suggested as the easiest to work with. 

4) Marker (to draw outline with)/ Pencil ( for initial outline)

5) Glaze ( to add a finish to the cups and make it safe to drink out of)

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So I based my design off of these cups from the sailor moon anniversary products, my friend loves sailor moon and at first I thought i would order them but they would have taken too long to get here, thus is why i made these cups myself. So i bought the majority of my things from Micheals, which is a local craft store that sells only art supplies. You can go to any local crafts stores and see what they have, if you need help ask the associates for advice, they are very helpful.

so first off use pencil to outline your desired design, i did that at first but the pencil keeps rubbing off so i had to just use permanent marker to trace over whats left. lol. but I suggest you use pencil first so that you can still erase if you need to. As you can see from the photo above is how it looked before I started to paint it. 

the oil based paint I bought dries pretty quickly so only squeeze out a tiny amount at first so that you don’t waste your paint. to make different shades just mix the colours with white paint to get desired shades, since its oil based paint it can be patchy in some areas so make sure not to layer on too much paint at first to make it look smoother. after you cover your entire cup is when you should go back and fix the patches. 

now you need to read the label on your paint set to see how long you need to bake the cups for and at what temperature, yes you need to use heat to fixate the paint so that it does not run when water is used on it. as I recall it didn’t take long to bake so its a really easy step to do.

lastly if you are just using the cups for decoration which is what I made them for, you can just stop here, but if you are making it safe to drink you’ll need some sort of glaze to make it wash friendly. I would suggest talking to a person in stores to know which glaze to buy. I personally didn't need it but I know for future projects I will be acquiring that. As you can see from the last picture that I made It a little different than the colours of the original cups, but my friend loved it so I guess that’s all that matters.