Kids Build - Hand Colouring a Ceramic Butterfly

Hi, my name is Hazel and I am a makergirl. I recently was given a set of ceramic pens and I wanted to give them a try out. I just happened to have a rather boring looking butterfly money box that was just white. I thought it would look really awesome if it was decorated in lots of rainbow colours!

I am thinking that I am going to make more of these and put them outside in my garden to attract more butterflies. I love being in my garden, I plant a lot of flowers. I like the insects, buttlerflies and birds.

The products that I used for my Instructable was my ceramic butterfly and a set of Edding porcelain brushpens.

I looked at the edding website http://www.edding.com/creating-and-decorating/prod..and they have a cool video showing how to use the pens. I like the flower plates, I think I will do those next.

I like colouring and I like butterflies. I choose the table cloth for our Makerspace and I like every butterfly on the table too. It didn't take long to do the colouring but I found that some of the ink rubbed off as I was handling the butterfly. I was told that my fingerprints were causing the ink not to stick very well. Next time I will wear my butterfly gloves and then I wont have that problem. But you can just colour over any spots that come off.

Now that I have coloured everything, I am going to use the heat gun to bake the colour off slightly so that it will survive the trip home, so that it can go in the oven. The heat gun gets very hot, much hotter than a hairdryer, so you have to be very careful not to burn yourself. You also have to be careful that you don't burn anything else around you! So before you use one, make sure that your working area is clear. While you are using the heat gun, it is better to keep moving it around so everything gets heated evenly and nothing gets missed out, or burned because it is getting too much heat.

The Edding pens say you need to bake your project for 25 minutes at 160 degrees celcius, which I know is hot enough to bake my cakes and cook my chips! The heat is needed to fix the paint in place and make sure it doesn't come off when you touch it or if you need to wash it.

I hope you like my butterfly project! It is entered into the rainbow competition, if you like it please vote for it :-)