Mini Tole 101

I am trying to keep the blindfold over your eyes until the grand opening now. So today I will teach you some mini tole painting.

My thanks go out to Carol Duvall for this idea. For those of you that don't know who she is, she is "the queen of crafts" and used to have a daily show on HGTV. It is still on a couple of time a week in reruns.

She had all kinds of tutorials on her show about how to do real sized crafts. She swore up and down that she couldn't tole paint, but on one show she taught this technique in "big" with the wrong end of a paint brush. A light bulb went off above my tiny brain while she was working. Paint brush handle in real life = toothpick end in miniature. I started experimenting and came up with mini tole painting like her life sized version.

All you need to do it is some of the fancy toothpicks with carving at one end. Most import shops carry these and I pick them up at "Cracker Barrel Restaurants" on the freeway. You can use regular toothpicks, but I like the carved ones because that gives you two different sizes of circle to work with.

In the case of the flowers that I did here, I used the ever present Ceramcoat in red, white, blue and green. You can use whatever colors you like. You do need a pretty high contrast duo for the roses. For practice, I used plain old card stock to work on.

Here you see the basic steps. I should mention that the practice photos are way larger than the real thing. That's so that you can see better.

For the roses....Using the blunt end of the toothpick for practice, pick up a dot of red and place it on your practice surface. Then put a dot of white overlapping it by about 1/2. Take the pointy end of your stick and dig into the two puddles and stir. Don't stir too long or you will end up with solid pink. The bottom rose is what you want to end up with .

For the leaves.... Same dot with the big end of the toothpick. Pull out from the center with the pointy end again to make a leaf shape. The pointy end will be away from the flower. Then if you want to get really fancy you can fan the points by repeating the process several times in a fan shape.

For the little daisy like flowers you simply put 3, 4, or 5 dots (small end) in a circle and put a contrasting dot in the center.

Last but not least, the little blue sprays of lilac like flowers are just a series of dots in an arc. The largest on closer to the flowers. You do this by not re dipping the toothpick in the paint. Load the small end well and you can get about 5 dots before you have to dip again.

Once you get in some practice, you can do smaller flowers with the pointy end of your stick. When you look at these up close they seem sloppy on the practice sheet. When you put them on a piece of furniture they look pretty impressive.

I did this armoire this morning in about 20 minutes. I drew the stems on the doors with dark green. I tried to make them match up as mirror images. Then I started with the roses first. Always do the largest element first and work down to the smallest. I did roses, daisies, leaves and last was the lilacs.

Once you get the hang of this technique you can branch out(pardon the pun) into other flowers and different designs.

Have fun with it and let me know how it goes.

See you tomorrow.