Wildflower meadow

1. Wipe it, and find your line

Wipe the outside of the bowl and let it dry a minute. Then hold the glass as if you were drinking from it and note where your lip sits — everything you paint stays a finger's width below that.

Hold the glass by the stem from here on. Every touch on the bowl is a bit of grease, and paint lifts off grease in one piece.

2. Six stems, right the way round

Liner and sage. Draw a curved line from the bottom of the bowl upwards, turn the glass a little, draw another. Six in total, different heights, all leaning the same way.

Turn the glass, not your wrist. Six stems is what makes it a meadow instead of a posy on one side.

3. Add the leaves

Press the tip of the round brush against a stem and lift straight off — that press-and-lift is a leaf. Three or four per stem, alternating sides, right the way round.

4. Blooms on top

Dot five petals in a ring at the top of each stem — two blush, two butter yellow, two lilac. Keep every bloom below your line; if a stem has grown too tall, put its bloom halfway up it instead.

Reload the brush between petals so they stay the same weight, and keep each ring no wider than your thumbnail.

5. Centres and buds

A dot of ochre in the middle of every bloom, whatever colour its petals are — one shared centre is what makes three colours look like one meadow. Then buds on the bare stems, and fill any gap bigger than a fifty-pence piece.

6. Gold, then leave it alone

Scatter gold dots in the spaces with a cocktail stick, and run one gold band right around the bowl on your line. Twenty minutes before it moves.

That gold band is doing a job: it draws the eye to where the design stops, so the bare glass above it looks deliberate.