Tangentine blog

I have a tendency to call my work method a craft experiment. I like trying different things to see what works and what does not. A negative result is often  a better tool for learning than following someone else’s instructions. I usually make my own mistakes and then dive into any content I can find about a subject to ensure I understand it properly.

Except for my love for experimentation I seem to pursue colour as a theme in my work. So my latest investigation is quite a logical one. Enamelling.

I used my torch to do these pieces as I do not have a kiln (yet).

With this experiment I wanted to:

• Get a feel of how the enamel behaves when you melt it. I managed to the so-called orange peel texture as well as the glossy fully fused surface. Now I need to play around with it until I control the firing properly.
• Wanted to see what oxidation effects I get with having an uneven layer of enamel and the opaque colour. As you can see the one piece has a lot of visual interest because of the colour and texture variations. The brilliant red is oxidation – not enamel. I will probably make that into a pendant for myself.
• What happens to the texture and enamel if you form the metal after firing. That’s how I got the interesting texture in the top left piece.
• What affect I get when I draw in the enamel prior to firing (I need to play a lot more with this one).

I can’t wait to experiment with this over the next couple of weeks so that I can add some enamel pieces to my shop and I’ve already purchased some further materials so that I can play with different techniques and fire domed pieces.

Resources

If you’re interested in experimenting with enamel I strongly suggest you have a look at Copperheart blog.  She has a really cool metal blog and I know these tutorials will be a good place to help me focus my experiments in the next couple of weeks.

• Enameling Tutorial II: Sgraffito

• Enameling Tutorial III: Stencils

• Enameling Tutorial IV: Sift and Dump

If you want to play with enamel have a look at this tutorial:

Copperheart: Intro to enamelling

And what’s my favourite aspect of enamelling? I get to melt stuff.

Tags: craft, enamel, experiment, work method

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 at 12:17 pm and is filed under My stuff, Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.