8 Ways to Decorate Vases

Practice your motifs on a sheet of paper beginning by drawing the lemon, this is an oval shape with a point at either end. Leave a slither of the shape uncoloured in to give the illusion of a shine.

Then, using the green, draw two leaves at the top of the lemon.

Once you feel confident you can work onto the ceramic.

Repeat this motif working the lemons over each other to form a pattern, remember to work your lemon leaves in different directions to add movement.

To begin, choose your colour palette, this design can work in a range of colours to suit the season.

Start by painting ovals around the bottom section of the vase, leave a small oval unpainted in the middle of each.

Add the centres to your floral motifs by adding in a circle to the 5 petal floral.

Paint in the small ovals of your pink flowers and add dots to the centres of all of your ditsy florals.

Add water to your tray, making sure that the tray is deep enough to fit your vase into.

Add a couple of drops of ink to the water.

Once you are happy with the pattern sat on top of the water, take your ceramic and submerge it fully to create a full coverage pattern.

Then, leave it to dry!

To paint a gingham pattern, begin with painting stripes down your vase, once you have all of your vertical lines down, you can then paint lines horizontally to create the gingham effect.

This pattern uses gouache paints but you could achieve a similar effect with the posca pens, firstly you'll need to paint a rough floral shape- think of a loose scalloped circle to give you your shape

Repeat across the vase making sure your leaves are all heading in different directions to give movement and balance to the pattern

Create calligraphy style vases with the posca pens, writing your word or phrases across the ceramic. Elongate your letters to get a calligraphy style.

Thicken up your 'downward' strokes by adding another line very close to them, this will also help create a more calligraphy style lettering by having a contrast in the stroke thickness's.

With your posca pen you can letter your phrases across the bucket, for a calligraphy style lettering try to elongate letters, and lengthen the space between them as you write.

Once dry, using a darker coloured posca pen begin writing over the first set of lettering to give the idea of shadowed and 3d letters.

To seal the paints you can use a matt varnish which will make the vases waterproof or you can use them for dried flowers, grasses or faux flowers if you don’t want add a sealant.

You can either work on to the glass vases as they are on you can add a background colour by spraying with a coloured spray paint to give you a base.

Alternatively you could pour paint into the glass vase and leave to dry.