Are you a perfectionist and have to have your creations turn out perfect or do you keep your happy mistakes? This happened to me recently and I had to fix it, but I should have kept my happy mistake.

When I was in kindergarten, many many moons ago, I loved to finger paint—something about moving the slippery paint around the glossy paper that gave me joy. Recently I watched a video of a potter demonstrating finger painting underglaze on wax paper. I had to try it.

It didn’t turn out the way I envisioned it. I had to fix it and paint over the original design. I should have left it alone. Keep reading to learn what I did.

I cut out a piece of wax paper about the size of the slab I needed for a candy dish. With my fingers, I spread white, blue and purple under-glaze on the bottom half of the wax paper and yellow and red on the top half. Wax paper repels water and my underglaze and it wouldn’t stay put on the wax paper. It also left oval bare spaces.

I decided to use it anyways. I let the underglaze paint dry on the wax paper while I rolled out a slap of clay for the walls of the dish I was making. When the paint was mostly dry I laid it paint-side down on my clay slab and rolled a pony roller over it pressing the paint into the clay, which transferred the underglaze to the clay slab.

I peeled back the wax paper and the paint transferred beautifully onto the slab. I was hoping for an ocean sunset scene with a yellow horizon. There was no yellow horizon and there were many places where there wasn’t any paint.

I can fix that I thought. I painted yellow along the horizon. That didn’t turn out the way I wanted either. The yellow took over some of the red for the sky. I painted red to fill the spaces and cover up some of the yellow. I assembled my bowl but didn’t like the mess I had painted on it. I repainted a sunset ocean scene on my bowl.

When I looked at the video I’d taken I liked how the paint went on the slab before I had to ‘touch’ it up with more paint. I should have left it alone and let the underglaze and clay do their own thing. Sometimes my ideas and wanting to do it right, or my way, gets in the way of creativity.

I plan to make more items with this technique and let the glazes do the creation. My lesson here is to not be so perfect, as nothing is, and go with the happy mistakes.

Once I have clear-glazed and fired this piece I will add it to my shop here.

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