in this post for how to paint a terracotta pot I'm going to use burnt umber in folk art multi-surface and pueblos in the same folk art mulch a surface I may use autumn leaves I'm not sure yet and a touch of white for highlighting and this is my three-quarter inch flat brush that I link to in my blog post on my favorite tools and brushes that I like to use it this is my surface it's a 1 by 10 board that I cut to 11 and 3/4 inches long and even though they said call them one by tens are only nine and a quarter wide I've painted it black base painted it black but you can use a black canvas or whatever you like I'm just letting you know what I use for this now I'm going to put my pattern towards the center I'm going to use just the one pot for this one and I don't want it all the way to the bottom I want to be kind of like an inch or two above the base and I think it's pretty straight and I'm going to use a white piece of transfer paper graphite so here's the white one instead of black like you would use for on a lighter surface and forgive these spots there I accidentally got my transfer papers and paint and then smeared it but that's no big deal okay and then you take your stylus which I should have right here ah my stylus and I'm gonna just run it along the pattern and you'll be able to see the white line there it may it's faint but it's there I may need to use a little more pressure as I go along now the tape keeps it firmly in place so that I don't have lines skewed up wrong now you're certainly welcome to freehand this and a lot of times I do but you know a lot of people like to start with a pattern now this is not perfectly in the center and that's okay it doesn't matter I'm pretty easygoing with things like that now we're going to start with a white undercoat because especially with Kraft acrylics they're the reddish colors are not always opaque and to get the vibrancy that you want you need to undercoat with a white paint so I'm just going to fill in with right it doesn't have to be perfectly perfect because you're going to go over this with the terracotta colors for the pot now I am a little further away from this that I normally would be so I'm a little less meticulous but you can be more steady or what-have-you and get it closer to you and a lot of times I would turn it to a comfortable angle but I want to keep this in the camera so I'm not worried about getting it perfectly up there against the edge of the top of the pot any work has a Ledge there because that's going to be shadowed anyways when I'm done and I just try to get it worked in there as best I can you could be like I said before more precise if you desire and if you want the pot to come down a little further just pull the white down a little bit now we're going to let this dry and if we need to go over it again to make it a little more opaque for a background we can I'm just going to proceed forward once it dries I'm going to go ahead and do the terracotta color now the white base coat has dried and it's not completely opaque you can see some of the black through it but that's okay and now over here to the right let me see if I just squish it a little bit closer in I am loading my brush with the Terracotta and I'm just going to carefully follow the strokes from before it's a little bit on the dry side so I'll really load and Stroke it is evenly as I can and this is a rectangle so that I can do just a long straight stroke it sees dragging but that's okay I'm just gonna fill it in I'm gonna try to keep that as straight as possible now another trick if you want crisp clean lines is to use painters tape and tape around the edges and then your lines will be crisper but I like the more artistic I call it effect of them not being absolutely perfect now you just keep filling in can you hear my hawk out there he's probably being chased again by a hummingbird I caught a hummingbird chasing the hawk away from their nest the other day and it was quite the sight to see okay so I'm just gonna kind of run my line that way and along the bottom edge you see some white showing I'm not too concerned about some white peeking through or around it because that kind of adds a little highlight around it okay so it's at a point now where that will lift if I paint any more on it so I'm actually out of the paint so I'm going to put a little more Pueblo onto my onto my palette paper here and I'm going to just come along the top edge now the top doesn't have to be square you actually can make it dip a little bit towards you and what I mean by that is I'm kind of making it arc because this is a round object they're not square and unfortunately I got it to square but I can come back later and I'll show you what's shadowing how we can take care of that now the idea of this pot or why I'm showing you how to do this pot is because with many of my other flower tutorials like my lavender how to paint lavender or even well any of them you can put them in a pot you know I can pay it lavender now or lilacs hydrangeas daisies you name it I could put those in this pot so I'm at a point where I'm just going to leave it to dry now so I don't lift up any of the paint and we'll come back and put in either another coat in areas where I think it needs it or we'll do some shadowing and highlighting or both well instead of just telling you to tape along the edges I'm going to go ahead and show you for those that really like sharp edges I'm using frog tape I really like the Frog tape for my painting projects and I'm just kind of going along and making a straight line you notice how it kind of dips there but that's okay and then I do shorter pieces for along the other edges overlapping as I need to I need to do a square piece there a lot of times I would do like this edge like this and then like this and then I would come in and paint that section so I'm going to grab my brush this paints a little on the thick side so I'm add a little bit more water load my brush well over here it's just I'm just loading it up and then I would just come along and paint it now when you put your paint down you really want to rub your finger along the edge sometimes I use a credit card and that really makes that edge tight tighter and so I've got that painted on there you could have done this with the you could have done this with the white undercoat as well I'll leave that section on I'll take off excuse me these two sections throw that away and then I would come along I would let that dry a little bit but I'm impatient right now to get this going so I'm going to do this in the bottom now like I said these are rounded items so I'm not real precise and crisp edges but I know some people do like to have things a little more precise so then I would just come along now with these edges tape down you don't want to go over it that way you want to come this way pull from the tape side towards the center or parallel with it so let me show you again I'm loading my brush a little bit of paint and I would just go up like that and there you have it and then you just pull up the tape while it's wet unless you wanted to do another coat and that will give you more precise lines when painting your pot or there's also stencils out there if you wanted to do like a ton of signs or something that had terra cotta pots as the base of your plants stencils could be an option for you I prefer but not having stencils it just is quicker for me but a lot of people that's it's a good route so now we see that still quite a bit of white on the top now normally I'm not going to really mind about this because the plants are gonna there's gonna have a little over overlay there so I don't really worry much about that and if you this bothered you like a white edging here you could come in with your black let me see if I have a block I do so and with a liner or small brush you can just come in alongside the pot and fill in so that's just a couple options for you to neaten it up if there was things that bugged you about having the undercoat showing like that or you could put like on this part here that's showing some white you could put like a bud felt fell down or a leaf or something like that okay so we're gonna let this dry again and then I'm going to come back I'm going to show you how I shadow it highlight it to give it some more dimension now it really comes in handy when you want to add the details to have an inspiration piece so I here have a pot that I can see and look at to kind of do my shadowing and highlighting I had to stop the Sun to dry it's pretty hot so I'm trying to get it to cool off so while that's cooling I will show you how I'm going to load my brush here I have a blending gel you can also use floating medium folk art has both oh let me reach over for the floating medium here's floating medium this is blending gel now the floating medium will work just as well you just have to be more careful with it because it will lift the paint if you overwork it but the floating gel will not so let is I have my 3/4 inch brush and I have my burnt umber that's dried from yesterday burnt umber I don't eat a lot so I'm going to kind of shadow along the edges or one edge and along under here and maybe along the top so I'm loading see if I can get this in here for you loading with the floating gel in my brush and then I'm gonna come and just kind of work it you know my brush you see how it's fading along there that's I want that for right along this rim hundred seer casting a shadow under the lip of the rim of the top part you know the part that's now truth be told if I was doing this accurately this would have a little bit more of a dip in it because its rounded and then I'm gonna do the same along the top I'm gonna go back over to my pallet paper and I'm just going to go in the part that I had on work today and I'm not gonna go into more paint or more blending gel and then I'm gonna go along the top of this pot because the plants and stuff in it are gonna cast a shadow just not the very top but just under the top along the top edge and you can try to make it then round it there or you can do straight it's not a big deal because as I said before a lot of times the plants will be coming over it now in this part I'm going to shadow along a side you can choose if you want to choose a light source that's just a little too stark for me so I'm just going to rub some of that out now I could do one side and a clica light source is coming from this side or I could do a little bit on both sides and if you want if you find a spot that you have overdone it and you want to take some off I'll take a damp and sponge or paper towel and I'll just clean it up now that's got damp spot on it so I'll let that dry and I'm just going to kind of bring in some shadow along this side maybe pull in a little bit see how faint it is it's easier to go up and to take away unless you want to get that damp paper towel and and you just add a little bit more as you think it needs it got that little too much gel in there it's bubbling and if you wanted to go underneath the pot you could it doesn't really show up on the black but on a dark surface it would now I'm going to go into some do it there is white on there already but I want to do like a light edge if you look at my pot the top edge is light you see that so I'm kind of going to put that in now over here on my palette I've got the color that was the terracotta color which is called Pueblo and I'm just adding a touch of white to it because I didn't want stark white there I wanted to create a rim with a lighter color of the terracotta and I'm going to use that color I'm going to go into some blending gel now I've got that color on my brush that lighter color and I'm gonna kind of put a highlight in right there and maybe along the lower edge here not underneath there's the underneath but along the lower edge and I might make this over here be a light source so decide that that's gonna be a light source so let's see how it's a little lighter there now I could have shattered over there and then just had my highlight here to bring it forward see how I jump around for you there so I could also decide what I want a shadow on this side so I'm going to shadow this after all now I had some little mossy stuff green stuff on my pot and if I want to emulate that I can pounce on a little bit of green kind of mixed some with a burnt umber to tone it down a little bit like a very olivey green so or I can do another little trick and I'll go ahead and share that here so I have a toothbrush this is an old toothbrush that's worn out and I dipped it in water so it's got some water in it not too much and then here's some thicket on my palate paper and I'm just kind of making it an inky consistency I don't want it too thick and then I will take a piece of paper and test this on and I don't have a piece of paper close by one moment so here's my piece of paper and I'm going to take you can do this with your thumbnail which you do have a little bit more control but it makes a mess of your nails unless you put on gloves so I have another brush here and I'm just going to drag my paintbrush over and you see the splatter there you kind of want to aim it so you can't get as close as you can but you don't want big splotches you want little ones so I have little specks going on there now if you wanted to protect the other around you can you just lay down paper around the edges and so now you have the little green flecks in there get also pants a little bit on there with your scruffy brush or a sponge but I didn't want it to be too standout ish so I just go ahead and do a little bit of touch of the green with the toothbrush trick which is they call that fly specking and decorative painting and there you have your terracotta pot and like I said before you could fix the black along the edges if that bothered you so this can be used for many types of paintings you could do this on white a white background or a wood-look background like my video on how to paint a faux wood or many other types of things you can make a sign out of this like add wording up here and you could add a frame inexpensive homemade DIY frame which I probably will do something like that I'm going to shatter that a little more I've got the blending gel and a little bit of the on my brush just a spot just a touch there we go and you could do this in many ways I have the pattern which I will post on the blog in my resource library and it has two size pots so you can do two together you could do three together you can do you know a long board or canvas and do whatever you like so there you have your easy to paint terracotta pot