11.25.19 Hello there, Prickly Pear - Cloisonne Enamel, Part 3

The notion of experimenting continued into the last two days of class.  Ricky encouraged everyone to play around with bending wire, and to look at our "bad" pieces as sketches or sources of ideas for the rest of our work.

One of the specific things he suggested was cutting a shape - square, circle, freeform - out of a piece of paper and use it to visually crop our previous pieces.  This turned out to be an incredibly useful tool for me.


By moving the cutout in my paper over various sections of my experimental pieces, I was able to choose a color palette - mostly blue and green, with some variations on red - and I started playing around with bent pieces of wire.


The other thing Ricky introduced - as a way to create interest beyond just color - was the concept of textured foil.




We had used foil to create reflective areas on our test pieces, but adding texture behind the enamel enabled the creation of even more design variation.

So, armed with a color choices, wire, and background ideas, I started to consider what kind of story I wanted to tell with my cloisonne...I originally thought about wildflowers, but my skills just didn't seem up to that. 

I've used a cactus motif - a lot - on the backs of my turquoise pendants, and I thought I might do that for the cloisonne as well.

I tried bending wire into the shape of a saguaro - but that didn't work so well - and I took another approach; bending little "u" shapes and stacking them up to look like a prickly pear.  That worked quite well.


I wanted to give my idea a try on a copper base before moving on to the fine silver disc we had available...just to see how if it would look I the way I had envisioned. I was satisfied with my initial result and decided I was ready to move on to silver.

There was definitely room for improvement.  I liked the colors, and the look of the textured foil behind the green enamel - but the cactus didn't really fill the oval as much as it could, and the blue was a little too intense.

I opted for two more pieces - one on the fine silver, and another using textured foil to cover a copper oval - giving me a completely reflective background for both.

I lightened up the blue background, which created more contrast with the green, and was definitely pleased with the two enamel cabochons I finished on the last day.

I decided to set all three of them, with twisted wire and granules, and I am delighted with the finished pieces.

I don't know when - or if -  I'll embark on enamel again, but I'm so glad that I took this class...for the opportunity to meet and learn from Ricky, to explore new design ideas, and just to have some fun.



Until next time.

11.11.19 Let it go, let it go... Cloisonne Enamel, Part 2

Photo credit: Ricky Frank

For the entire week of class, Ricky repeated the following mantra; forget good or bad, forget right or wrong - unless the enamel doesn't fuse to the metal you will get a result. 

As I said last time, he was very clear that his goal was to teach us the basic science and techniques of cloisonne enamel - and NOT "how to make cloisonne like Ricky".

He also brought along cases full of his jewelry - and I selected a piece for myself on the first day of class.  It was a very freeing experience - because it meant that whether or not I completed a piece of my own that I wanted to set, I had a new pendant - and that made me very happy.

Having learned how to prepare a base and apply enamel on the first day - we spent the next two days focusing on the science of light and color.  One of the things that gives Ricky's pieces such depth and rich color is his use of metal (silver and gold) to reflect and enhance the light that bounces back through the glass.

He achieves this either by using a metal base or by adding metal foil in layers to his pieces.  

We made a number of sample pieces by covering some or all of a prepared base in foil - both silver and gold - so that we could begin to work with layering color.

The exercise was not just about art - there was a very important science lesson involved...some colors of enamel (remember, it's ground glass) are reactive with metal when they fuse.  I had an "oh, yes, that's right" moment when I remembered learning about this property for some colors in my glass fusing classes at Blue Moon Glassworks.

In order to prevent any unwanted reactions, the first step is to cover the metal with a layer of flux (not the same flux as metalsmiths uses to make solder flow) - which is clear glass - to create a barrier between the metal and the colored enamel.

We used red (which reacts with metal), blue, green and opal white to create samples with one and two layers of color that allowed to see how each color looks over gold, silver, and white.

At this point - Ricky told us we were going to make "some bad pieces" - which really meant no expectations other than more learning. 

The definition of "cloisonne" is an enamel piece with wire in it - just one wire will do.  So, that's what we did.  We added one piece of wire to a base, and experimented with it.

We worked with black and white backgrounds, foil, and the colors of our choice to make test pieces so that we could spend the last two days of class making "better pieces" (all the while remembering that the point of the class was to learn).

I'll share that process - and the results - in my upcoming...201st...post.

That's right folks, this is post number 200! Thanks for hanging in there with me and reading along for the last almost five years.

Until next time.