"It's going to be a humdinger," Kelly said. The convention is coming to the San Mateo Marriott Hotel next year, just a short drive up Highway 101 for Kelly and other members of the Santa Clara Valley Porcelain Artists club.

Until then, the group's members will be meeting sporadically to discuss what they call china painting or to pool their resources and host one of the 200 porcelain-painting teachers in the United States. There are only 44 members in the Santa Clara Valley Porcelain Artists club, with 30 or 40 additional unaffiliated artists who participate in some of the events.

Many of the people involved—mostly retired women, although younger people and men are also involved—say they first got interested after seeing older relatives doing this kind of painting or after finding hand-painted china family heirlooms.

China painting attracts primarily older women because it was something taught to women in the 19th century and passed down to daughters and granddaughters.

"When you went to college or finishing school in the 1880s, it was one of the subjects you studied, for refinement," Sunnyvale resident Harriet Rowe says.

But Rowe says this art actually began in China, where the apprentices and the artists were literally kept under lock and key because the porcelain manufacturers didn't want the secret of their process to leave the compound.

The secret involved the making of a very thin porcelain out of a finely grained clay called kaolin. This porcelain can be fired at higher temperatures.

According to Rowe, when the European manufacturers figured out the porcelain secret, they too kept apprentices and painters locked up.

Each porcelain company also came up with its own style of painting that the artists had to follow perfectly.

Rowe says the whole secrecy-formula notion began to change when a German painter came to America in the late 1800s. He realized he could paint whatever design he wanted, and that was the beginning of the natural painting style that is prevalent today. Rowe says one of the most famous painters came to San Francisco in 1905 but moved to Southern California after the 1906 earthquake hit.

Unfortunately, the women say, the art is dying out because it is no longer taught in schools, and many women do not have the time it takes to get involved until after they retire.

"It's wonderful to think that people have done this for years, and we've seen a lot of the artwork, and now we're doing it," Kelly said. "But you don't get to learn how to do it in schools."

Instead, interested artists must find any of the few local classes or teachers available to teach china painting and the technique that goes into it.

Paints cost anywhere from $3 to $22 and consist of two parts, a mineral-based powder and an oil medium to make the paint liquid. Gold, iron and selenium are typically used to make the various colors. Each brush the artists use is a handmade piece made of Russian squirrel hair. Blank teacups can be bought from distributors—called white dealers—for about $3 apiece.

But although china painting is relatively inexpensive to do and doesn't take much more artistic talent than any other type of painting, the few teachers in the United States are highly sought after for their insight and unique techniques.

Most recently, Kelly and nine other women—some a part of the club, some just interested in the craft—pooled enough money to bring renowned artist Mary (Ashcroft) Seehagen to Sunnyvale. Seehagen said she is booked solid for almost 2¹/2 years, for appearances all over the country.

Seehagen said the most important part of painting is the "feel" one must have for the piece. When paint on a brush touches a canvass, the transfer of color is immediate. But because of the glaze that coats china, the paint is absorbed slower. Mastering that timing is "the feel," and it shows in a hand-painted item. Some china is made with decals that are then fired onto the piece in a kiln, but the result isn't unique like the hand-painted china.

"If you hold a piece just right in the light, you can see the brush strokes," Rowe's husband Jack Rowe said. "You don't have that with decals."

Working on "the feel" is one of the reasons the women wanted Seehagen to come out to Sunnyvale. She is a professional china painter from Caro, Mich., who paints at least one piece a day, sometimes more, averaging about 1,000 pieces a year. She sells her finished pieces at conventions around the country. Her husband is also a classically trained German porcelain artist, who painted pieces for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Princess Grace of Monaco and Adolf Hitler.

"It's a dying art, so it's very hard to get good teachers," Rowe said. "We consider ourselves very fortunate to have her here."

While in Sunnyvale, Seehagen stayed in a guest room in the half of Rowe's duplex that Rowe has turned into a porcelain haven. The garage is full of boxes of white pieces waiting to be painted; shelves in what would be the dining room are full of painted pieces. Next to her oven in the kitchen sits a firing kiln—not much larger than a water cooler—ready to heat up to 1350 degrees.

During the four days of teaching, Seehagen taught her students about basics like planning art on a "blank"—an unpainted china piece—and advanced techniques like removing color to add highlights to rose petals.

Each student wrote out his or her own directions for painting, and Seehagen went over those procedures with the students. As they completed each step, she evaluated it, commenting and correcting when necessary.

The variety of pieces being painted—including dinner plates, flower vases and teacups—illustrated the difference between china painting and traditional painting.

"The really great thing about china painting is that we can paint on numerous shapes, not just flat canvasses, so we never get bored," Seehagen said.

Anyone interested in porcelain painting can call Harriet Rowe at 408.733.9132. They can also visit www.ipat.org, the website of the International Porcelain Artists and Teachers.