Getting Fired Up Over Ceramics
The women who come for friends’ night at Mudd Beach call the paint-it-yourself ceramic store therapy. The couples who pick a piece to paint together say it’s self-expression. But the 10 girls at Emily Rosen’s 9th birthday party know only that it’s fun.
“You can paint what ever you want and it’s fun to paint,” said 8-year-old Grace Fisher. “My mom said I would get really painty, but look, I didn’t and I didn’t even make a mess.”
Ceramic workshops where you pick out a piece, paint and glaze it and leave it for three days to be fired in a kiln have been popping up in the artsy enclaves of Southern California for at least five years. The stores like Mudd Beach and Color Me Mine are always crowded when Mother’s Day and Father’s Day roll around. As the holidays gets into full swing, they are filled with a bunch of would-be Picassos.
“People come because it’s fun to be creative and they can make something totally original,” said Cindy Miller, a worker at Mudd Beach. “Couples make stuff, families come in. . . . We get a lot of tourists and kids too.”
Birthday parties are one of the most popular promotions at Mudd Beach. For $15 per person, party attendees paint any item with a price up to $10, using all the non-toxic paint they want for 1 1/2 hours, to transform the plain white object into something colorfully unique.
For individuals, prices range from $3 for a tiny blowfish to more than $40 for a serving tray. Stores typically charge about $6 an hour for paint time--the average time is 1 1/2 hours. So the average trip costs about $25, although most stores feature half-price days when the painting time is less.
At Color Me Mine on the hip boutique-lined strip of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, patrons have a wide choice of ceramics to choose from. They can paint a rectangular shaped pupu platter or castle in the clouds, a colorful fish, sleepy dogs or coffee mug.
“You can make a unique one-of-a-kind gift that has your own personal stamp on it,” said Jim Yamauchi, who owns the store with his wife, Emi. “People have their baby’s footprints put on their creations; they do all kinds of creative things.”
Color Me Mine is part of a national chain started by Robin and Josh Monroe. The stores were ultimately purchased by the Koo Koo Roo restaurant chain and were recently sold to Versent, which owns a line of paints. There are now 47 stores nationwide, including 14 in Southern California.
Color Me Mine fires all its ceramics, or bisques, at a factory in Van Nuys and ships the ceramics to stores. Each store is slightly different, according to Jennifer Smith, a franchise liaison for the Southern California stores with studios in Encino and San Diego offering glass works and mosaics in addition to ceramics. The Santa Monica store also offers mosaics.
Many of the do-it-yourself ceramics stores have stencils and sponges for the artistically challenged, but Color Me Mine makes art even easier with its database of designs. Each store is equipped with a computer that has 25,000 drawings ranging from fish to planes. Each drawing can be printed out and traced onto the ceramics.
Like Mudd Beach, Color Me Mine stores offer parties and also have weekly paint busts where painting time is 50% off. The stores also offer a to-go paint kit for $50 per day (a $100 deposit is also required) for those folks who prefer to have a party at home. They also sell materials such as paints and ceramic pieces to paint at home.
Going to the studio, however, is still the way most people prefer to go. On a recent weekend, the Lindee family from Santa Monica sneaked away from Mom for a few hours to make a birthday gift for her along with a reindeer Christmas ornament for their tree. Rachel, 8, and her 5-year-old sister, Shannon, do most of the painting while dad, Mark, supervises and helps them color in the hard-to-reach crevices.
“My mom doesn’t know we came here,” said Rachel, who plans to give her mom the gift for her birthday today. “I think she’ll like it.”
BE THERE
Mudd Beach, 1113 Manhattan Ave., Manhattan Beach, (310) 318-2242, and 148. W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 449-4050; Color Me Mine, 1109 Montana Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 393-0069. Call (818) 780-2797 for additional locations or check https://www.colormemine.com; Paint ‘N’ Party, 2010 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Manhattan Beach, (310) 939-9226; Paint Me Glaze Me, 646 Marquette St., Pacific Palisades, (310) 573-4265; Clay Bisque, 1704 S. Catalina Ave., Redondo Beach, (310) 316-5669.
