Hi!
Last week my family and I went to Door County for a couple of days. It was very fun, I always really enjoy it up there!
While we were there, we went to Hands On Art Studio, which we always love going to. We’ve been several times before but it’s been many years since our last visit, so it was fun to go back.
It’s located on this little farm in Door County, and they have several buildings that you can do different art projects in. We always to the ceramic painting in their big barn, and they have this really cool space for it on the second level. You paint whatever item you choose and then they fire it for you and you can pick it up the next day. It’s so rewarding to see the finished product, it’s always so shiny and cool!
This year we all went with functional items. Dad did a platter that’ll hold chips and guacamole, one of our family’s favorite snacks. Mom did a heart shaped bowl for her jewelry. I did a flower pot. Ben did a plate for deviled eggs, and Ro did a pretty platter for putting baked goods and stuff like that on. Everyone’s turned out so well!
What’s something you liked about it (and why)? I really love the environment. That upstairs loft space is just so inspiring, cool and helps you be creative. There’s lots of wood, a ton of natural light coming through, they have tables decorated with paint splatters, racks with all the projects to choose from and shelves with tons of paint options. It was also rainy that day, which made it even more cozy. It’s just a really neat space up there and is definitely a place I like to be! It’s so fun to spend hours on whatever you’re making, having little conversations that pop up here and there with the people you’re with, it’s so relaxing and fun.
Also, this time around I really liked the idea of designing functional items. I found some pictures online for inspiration and designs that I liked ahead of time, and I enjoyed seeing all the potential items when we were deciding what to choose. I love the idea of decorating cool plates, jars to hold things, whatever, that you design and that you can actually use regularly! Especially plates, I liked that because a friend of ours has cute plates that she puts baked goods on and I thought it would be fun to make my own. I was deciding between that and the flower pot. I ended up going with the pot, which is also something I can use.
What’s something you disliked about it (and why)? I didn’t really love how mine turned out. I like the concept that I chose— it was based off of this piece of art I found of St. Therese from Ascension Press…
Hopefully you can see what I was going for, but I don’t really like how I executed it. I shared some pictures of the flower pot below. It’s just very sloppy and not as detailed as I wanted, plus the green stems didn’t show up that good. But it was hard to get it detailed, mainly because I was using too big of brushes, therefore the lines were chunky. I was trying not to go over dark colors with light colors so I had to go around a lot of the shapes and lines, and I also needed to do three coats of each color, so with the big brushes, that didn’t work. It was very meticulous which was not super fun and it wasn’t that rewarding because I could see that it was going to be sloppy. So I probably should have done a different design or asked if they had a smaller brush (or I should’ve looked for the smallest one they had and tried harder with that).
What was your biggest takeaway or lesson? Like I shared above, I love the idea of designing functional items, and I think my biggest takeaway was the desire to do more of this ceramic painting as I get older for my own house someday. I’d be very fun to design some of my own platters, dishes, containers, etc.
What is something you’re curious to learn more about as a result of this experience? I’d definitely love to go again! If we did, I’d like to look up more design ideas and examples to get even more inspiration for functional projects, and I’d like to learn some techniques for how to make them look cooler.
Thanks for reading!
God bless!
Lucy
Here’s the before-and-after photos of our projects…
