Customizing Your Dinnerware: Pebeo vs Marabu Painting Techniques

A stack of plain white plates for a few euros at a weekend brocante, in a corner of the coast that has been firing pottery since long before either of us was born. They’re begging to be painted. The only question worth asking first is which parts of them you’re allowed to touch.

The safety rule that comes before the paint

Neither of these paints is sold as food contact material, and the manufacturers don’t claim otherwise. Craft paints of this type have not been tested for what happens if traces end up in your food, which is exactly why the standard advice is to keep them away from the parts of a piece that touch food or lips.

There is a proper legal framework behind that caution. In the EU, anything genuinely intended to come into contact with food falls under Regulation (EC) No 1935/2004, and ceramic articles have their own specific measure, Directive 84/500/EEC, which sets migration limits for lead and cadmium and requires a written declaration of compliance from the manufacturer or importer. A tube of decorative paint from a craft shop sits outside that system. Painting the outside of a mug is a decorating job; painting the inside is quietly turning a compliant object into a non-compliant one.

In practice this leaves you plenty of canvas. The outer wall of mugs and bowls, the underside of saucers, the flat rim of a serving plate as long as you stay a good centimetre or two clear of where food sits, the handles, the lids of storage jars. My own habit is to draw the edge in pencil first, then never cross it.

Same idea, two different recipes

Both products work the same way conceptually: you paint on cold, then a low domestic oven cures the film into something hard and washable. The details of that cure are where they part company, and getting them the wrong way round is the most common reason a design lifts in the sink a fortnight later.

That last line is the one to write on your hand. Marabu is explicit that the fired colour holds up to a 50°C wash, which on most machines means the glasses and cups programme rather than the sixty-degree cycle you’d use for a roasting dish. Treat both brands as delicate-cycle objects and they last; treat them as everyday crockery and you’ll be repainting.

How I actually work through a set

The order matters more than the brush technique. This is the sequence that has stopped me wasting plates.

1. Degrease properly. New porcelain carries a factory film and second-hand porcelain carries everything else. Wipe with rubbing alcohol, let it flash off, then stop touching the surface with bare fingers. Skin oil is the invisible cause of half of all patchy adhesion.
2. Mark your no-go zone. A light pencil line inside the rim, or a ring of masking tape. Pencil burns off in the firing; check on a test piece if you’re unsure of yours.
3. Test on the ugly plate. Every brocante haul contains one plate nobody will miss. Paint your colours on it, fire it, wash it three times. That plate tells you more than any review will.
4. Thin coats, not one thick one. Thick paint on a curved glazed surface sags before it dries and cracks in the oven. Two light passes beat one confident one.
5. Respect the drying window. With Marabu those four hours are part of the instructions, not a suggestion. Firing paint that’s still soft underneath is how you get bubbles trapped under a hard skin.
6. Cold oven in, cold oven out. Both brands say go in without preheating and let the piece cool with the oven. Porcelain hates thermal shock, and a plate that survives the heat can still crack on the worktop.

Colour choices that survive the firing

Two things surprise people the first time. Colours generally deepen and gloss up in the oven, so what looks slightly chalky at the painting stage is not the final answer. And metallic or pearlescent effects, which both ranges offer, are a poor idea on anything that might ever go in a microwave. Metal particles and microwaves are a combination to keep out of your kitchen entirely.

For mixing, stay inside one brand. Both are water-based and both look similar in the pot, but they’re formulated to fire on their own schedules, and a blended shade sitting between two protocols is a shade you can’t reproduce next time either. If you want a graduated effect, dilute within the range or use the brand’s own medium.

The same logic applies to any finish you build in layers, whether it’s on porcelain or on wood. I made the argument at more length when I compared Liberon and V33 for restoring vintage furniture: the product family decides the result far more than the badge does.

Questions that come up once the oven’s on

Can I paint a piece that already has a pattern?

Yes, and it’s often more forgiving than a blank white plate, because an existing motif gives you something to work with and hides small hesitations. Check the piece is genuinely glazed and not a matt earthenware, which drinks paint unevenly.

What if I make a mistake before firing?

Unfired paint comes off with water or alcohol on a cotton bud, and that’s the whole beauty of the oven-fix system. You have as long as you need until the oven door closes. After firing, a mistake is permanent.

Can I fire in the same oven I cook in?

It’s the intended method for both brands, and the temperatures involved are ordinary baking temperatures. Ventilate the kitchen while it’s running, don’t cook at the same time, and wipe the oven out afterwards. If the smell bothers you, that’s your cue to open the window wider rather than to shorten the firing.

Will it survive a summer of daily use?

A mug decorated on the outside, washed gently, holds up well. What kills these finishes is heat and abrasion: hot cycles, scouring pads, or being stacked wet with something heavier on top. Hand wash the pieces you care about and they’ll outlast the season easily.

Does the same paint work on glass?

Marabu’s range is sold for porcelain and glass together. Pébéo splits the two, with a separate glass line, so check the pot rather than assuming. Glass also expands differently from porcelain, which is another good reason to sacrifice a test piece first.