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.