Kooky Cookie: Café Céramique

Café Céramique

This is one of my favourite places to date. I have been going to Café Céramique for a few years now and still when I come home its always on my to do list. The only issue is that whoever I go with will inevitably be bored. I am more than happy to sit there for 3 to 4 hours in my own little world and paint, but whichever poor person has been lovely to accompany me will end up glancing at how much else there is to paint or how slowly I am painting.

This time the poor victim was my little brother Seb who was very nice to come with me, if he had not I would have been all on my lonesome which is less fun. Always appreciate company.

Here he is working on a project, something to do with interviews working with Graham. It sounds tedious but he is getting paid, and I am jealous. To his right his healthy lunch.

Café Céramique Is in Jumeriah, In one of the older parts of town.

There used to be a Café Céramique in Mall of the Emirates but unfortunately it closed, so now the only available ones are in Jumeriah and the other is a distance away in Festival Centre up with the Hard Rock.

The walls are lined with white ceramic models and plates and general brick a brack that you can choose to paint.

In the past I have always painted things like plates or mugs, I love looking at all of the figures but you cant really do much than paint them one colour. With a plate or something more blank you have a bit more free reign.

This is something have painted previously and is probably one of my best.

So when you go in you can have a look round all the shelves and pick what you want to paint. All of the items have different prices so if you are on a budget or if you fancy splashing out there is something for everyone. One day I can see myself going in and picking a huge cookie jar or something of the like. Something that will most likely take all day and something I will no doubt become overly attached to.

This time however I was thinking about something fun, and was thinking about a tea pot or the like, When I found this it was love at first sight. Or as much as you can love a teacup and saucer combo. Either way there was no way I wanted to do anything else once I had found this!

The mat it is sitting on is the colour selection, It shows you all the things you can chose, the only pain is that you only get 5 main colours and two of the other ones from the 'puffy' or 'speckled' range.

While painting it is rather nice to take a break and grab a bite. They do serve very nice food, Great for little snacks in between brush strokes.

Lets face it, for nibbles there is something just nice about chips. They are not healthy, they are not the most dignified of food, however they are yummy and they seem to fit the bill in all situations.

Some garlic bread may have mysteriously appeared and then equally mysteriously disappeared. Who knows, perhaps it was simply a good friend of the chips or perhaps it fancied an adventure.

So first things first I did the wrong thing and started sketching out my design. I do this almost every time never considering that there will have to be a background and I have just slowed myself down like nobodies business and will have to go around each flipping doodle individually.....

So the theme that seemed to happen while drawing was Owls. I am rather fond of Owls so why not have an owl tea pot and cup.

So the other annoyance with doing something like this is that this is un-kilned china. So its rather rough, pencil lines smudge if you are not careful and its not too nice to handle if you are a bit silly like myself.

When you get all your paints the next challenge is that they will usually seem the wrong colour because they change in the kilning process. In this case I tried to do a blending blue/purple starting dark at the bottom and working up getting lighter. In all of the photos is looks as if I have just painted it a sort of pale blue throughout and that it looks rather washed out, which is random as I chose the brightest colours in each case. Lets hope it comes out nicer when its all done.

Here we are all painted.