Tea With The Doctor

These are tea cups I painted for the Reddit Doctor Who exchange. I got really excited when I saw that my match was a tea lover. I thought it'd be great to make a Doctor Who themed tea set. I brainstormed for a while what to.

I came up with four designs that I thought wouldn't be too hard to paint. I then went searching for a canvas and ended up buying a set of Gracie China, Ruffle Collection tea cups. The ruffled saucers are beautiful! I ended up dropping the first set I bought and broke a cup. (skillllz)

Luckily the second set I ordered came quickly and now I had back up cups in case I really screwed up painting. My next step was to figure out what kind of paint I needed for porcelain. The good people at Michael's suggested Martha Stewart's Glass Paint. I used the Michael's app to get 40% off a set of the gloss opaque paints which I thought had all the colors I needed. WRONG. After starting to paint the Union Jack, I realized what I thought was red was actually orange and what I thought was black was dark brown. Thankfully I had some extra cups!

I used the Martha Stewart Spray Paint System to paint all the saucers black. It was kind of like using magic! I didn't get the ratio of paint to primer right at first and it was a little runny, but I got the hang of it eventually. Then I used a toothbrush to flick yellow, orange, and blue specks on the plates to make them look like SPACE.

After letting the paint dry for a day, I hand painted the DW TARDIS on each saucer - some of them turned out better than others.

I originally tried using masking tape to cover up the white spots for the windows but when I peeled the tape off, a lot of the paint came with it. I ended up just repainting it by hand.

I also painted phrases on the bottom of each tea cup. The brushes I bought were nice because they had a VERY fine tip so that helped with the writing.

As you can see, my lines aren't all that straight, but I figured that way people will know they're hand made. I'm not sure if my Dalek cup is really recognizable - I wish the handle looked more like a toilet plunger - but I think the Exterminate! makes it better. 

This is probably my favorite one of the four. You can't really tell, but for each cup I painted the same design on both sides. I also thought the handle on the 10th's cup was looking a little lonely, so I added some 3D glasses. 

The paint takes 21 days to cure - or you can bake them for 30 minutes. Afterwards, they're supposed to be dishwasher safe. Though I'm not sure I would actually trust them in the dishwasher.

Oven time!

So that's the basic rundown of the Doctor Who tea set! I have 2 tea cups left that aren't broken/painted with an orange Union Jack so I think I may have to paint myself a TARDIS and 10th Doctor mug. And maybe throw a bow-tie somewhere in there.