Painting with Enamels

 

This year I purchased some S.64 painting enamels from Mer at Enamel Workshop and I love them.  The pieces shown above are my latest creations with these paints.

Others may do it differently but this is my creation process for these pieces.   These notes are as much for me as for anyone else, it's too easy to skip a stage and regret it later.   I thought if I was documenting it, it would be good to share it too..

Design stage

Looking for inspiration! 

Look around your garden, on the net, on Pinterest anywhere you can think of and find a flower, an animal or whatever design you are interested in doing, this is not to copy but to inspire you. 

Examine the shape and size of your proposed design, 

What will the finished item be?  A pendant, earrings, ring, panel etc. 

How big does it need to be to get the level of detail you want. 

What shape will fit it best. 

Do you dome it or not, if so how much,  

What colours do you want to use. 

What type of setting will suit it. 

Does it need holes punched (often forgotten). 

Most of these steps can't be changed once you begin so I try and take the time to plan all this out well before I start.  A rough drawing can help with this, some of mine are very rough indeed.

Preparing the blank

Cut and file the copper shapes / blanks. 

You can use a stencil to trace your shape, draw it freehand with a fine sharpie or use a paper cut-out glued to the sheet, I use an ordinary paper glue stick to attach these paper shapes to the sheet, once the blank is cut-out it needs a good wash to get rid of both the paper and the glue before the next step. 

Counter enamel the blank and Pickle it, clean it up after the pickle to remove as much of the pickle residue and fire scale as you can and apply and fire a top coat of enamel in whatever colour you choose. 

On the pictured  pieces I've chosen lighter colours for the ground so the design stands out nicely.

Drawing time.

You can use a very fine sharpie type pen to draw your outlines and once you are satisfied with the design details on your piece you can draw over the sharpie lines with black enamel.  The sharpie is easy to remove with alcohol and will disappear with heat.

Drawing with enamel

I use either Thompson's P3 overglaze black or Pearly's Black Liner with a crow quill pen to do the outlines.  

My P3 is oil based and Pearly's Liner I use with water.  Both work well with the pen. 

I thin the P3 with lavender oil at the moment, which I quite like, some find the perfume of the oil  overwhelming but I don't do enough of this work yet for that to bother me.  

Because you have a fired enamel base its easy to wipe it all off at any stage before firing and start your drawing again if it's not working for you, sometimes I end up wiping it all off quite a bit until I'm finally happy with the result.

Once you are happy with your drawing it needs to be fired to make it permanent. If you've used sharpie first this will burn off at this stage.

Smoke (instructions in the firing section) and Fire your drawing to gloss, allow it to cool and you are ready to paint. 

Painting

You can use a few different products to colour your drawing and can mix them with lots of different liquids. 

Mixers for Painting

There are many Enamelling books with buckets of information on painting with enamels and lots of info on the net, you can check out Thompsons in the USA re the oils they have and their uses or have a look at the Koodak website here in Australia as they stock Thompson products.

China paint suppliers also have water based mixers which dry quite quickly and don't require smoking and various types of oil based mixers that have different drying times so you can keep your design open and able to be changed for different times. 

I use lavender (essential oil) it dries reasonably quickly, if you put your piece on a heat pad or coffee cup warmer its usually dry enough to fire in 30 - 40 minutes.

Please be aware that all paints applied to enamel using an oil based mixer need to be smoked before firing to burn off the oil and prevent the oil from catching fire, which could effect your finished product and/or mess up your kiln.

I generally use S.64 enamel paints, although sometimes I mix it up a bit and add some China paints to a piece, but for the examples above they are all done with S64's using lavender essential oil, 

The types of paint you can apply on enamel are, China paints, S.64 Enamel Paints, Sunshine Enamels, Mason Stains and some other underglaze products meant for ceramics, I have a sample set of Walker's Stains that I have yet to try but I'm reasonably sure they will work well too. 

The way I look at it is that what you are doing is adding and melting colour pigment onto/into the Vitreous Enamel surface so, as long as your temperatures and times are right, any of these products should work, some colours may change or disappear in the heat, that depends on the mineral that the colour comes from and how it behaves at heat.   Obviously you need to do your own testing as there are so many variables between pigments, firing methods and temperatures.  

It's a good idea to test on an inconsequential piece or scrap and not on something you have already spent a couple of hours working on, just in case. 

Mixing and Applying your Paint

I apply my paints with the thinnest paint brushes I can find, mostly cheap brushes from Ebay. I have a couple of sable brushes but, the enamel being ground glass, cuts the bristles up quickly, so the cheaper option is the way to go for me.  The last lot of brushes I bought were 0, 00, & 000 Chinese synthetic bristle brushes,  a 10 pack of each size which should last me for some time. If you find these sizes are still too big you can carefully trim the bristles around the neck of the brush with scissors until it is as thin as you want. This works well.

You don't need much paint powder, maybe a double match head size or an amount 1/2 the size of your little finger nail would be enough, you are painting very small pieces.  Mix the smallest amount of powder with your medium of choice, a pallet knife is good for this. 

Add the powder to your pallet/plate/sheet of glass and add 1 drop of your medium away from the powder on the same pallet, pick up a small amount of the medium on your pallet knife and mix it into your enamel powder, pushing it and scraping it together, rather than stirring, until you get a paste, keep adding the medium very sparingly until you get the right consistency, say soft butter consistency and your paint should be ready to use, put your brush into the remaining drop of oil and thin the edge of your colour until you have a consistency you can paint with, takes a little practice but its not difficult. Paint away. 

I find I use separate brushes for the different colours otherwise I have to rinse the brush in turpentine  between each colour and I don't always remember to do that and besides the turps stinks.

I dry my pieces overnight or if I'm in a hurry I put them on a cup warmer for a while, then I can smoke them and fire them.

Firing

Any products used with oil need to be smoked before being fully fired. If you use Water based mixers you can skip this step.

For the pieces shown here I've only given the painted surface a single firing, the more firings the more chances of colour change or disappearance.  I have done pieces where I've applied a number of layers of paint with firings in between until I've built up a much more complex picture but for these simple flowers only a single firing for the paint was necessary.

Some enamel paint types will need a layer of clear enamel over them to give you that beautiful enamel gloss that we love. Any underglaze product such as underglaze paints, stains or ceramic products will need this and sometimes China paints can benefit from it too, however S.64 paints gloss beautifully and don't need an extra top layer.

Again you need to test this for yourself.  

For the pieces shown above I've torch fired all of the processes. Counter, topcoat drawing smoking and painting coat. 

Smoking your piece.

I smoke my pieces slowly with a small torch flame moving the flame under and away from the piece continuously until it stops smoking, then I increase the flame to fully fire the enamel. 

To smoke your piece for kiln firing, you bring your kiln up to temperature,  move your piece in and out of the hot kiln several times until it stops producing smoke, as you can imagine this drops the temperature in the kiln considerably, so even if I'm going to kiln fire my piece, I smoke it with the torch anyway. 

Also to torch fire the painted coat I tilt the piece slightly towards the  light so I can see when the painted areas gloss to avoid overfiring. it doesn't take long with a hot torch. 

My Torch 

I use a small handheld cylinder of Map gas or equivalent (yellow cylinder) with a hothead type torch head, both of these are from Bunnings (hardware store)

Please use all recommended safety precautions if you torch fire, I'm not recommending using a torch I'm just letting you know I use one.

If you give painting with enamels a go, have fun with it.😊

Crackle Enamel

Crackle Enamel

Yesterday was a crackle day.

If you are wondering exactly what that is, its making some crackle enamel pieces day, these pieces are destined to become earrings.

I really love crackle enamel. Its all about transparent enamels with a touch of opaque and long firing time. The results are always unpredictable and often very beautiful.

This time I took some inspiration from another enamelist Grace Wolf, who kindly shares some of her beautiful crackle recipes on Facebook. I don’t necessarily have all the colours she uses which of course changes the finished product, but I'm very happy with these results.

Crackle has real depth and because of its transparent nature when you look into it you can see all its intricate detail, its reactions to heat and the various melting temperatures of the different enamel colours.

My procedure for these pieces was as follows;

I cut and prepared the blanks with counter enamel and fired them.

These went in a warm pickle-pot for around 10 minutes to remove fire-scale, then they were rinsed in clean water and dried. (I use a Citric acid pickle, the recipe is easily found on the net)

Because they were to have transparent enamel over the raw copper, I gave them a once over with an abrasive wheel in my flex-shaft to remove the last of any fire scale left on the surface.

The first enamel top coat on these was a reasonable cover coat of Thompsons Opal White for sparkle, then they were kiln fired.

Once cooled, I added the base colour coat, yesterdays had 3 or 4 layers in various thicknesses of transparent colours added, the last being Thompsons 2008 Clear crackle, then kiln fired them.

The final coat on these was more of the same transparents, finishing with an opaque top coat. 

For these pieces the opaque top coat was placed in particular areas. 

The opaque top coat is flexible, it can be placed in a particular area of the piece or it can cover the piece totally, it can also be a mix of opaques, as was applied to the blue and orange piece which I added both red towards the top and orange towards the bottom, or just a single complimentary colour or any colour or combination of colours you choose, it just needs to be opaque.

The opaque coat can also be of varying thickness, anything from a light sprinkle to full cover, the thicker the coat the more sgraffito is needed to obtain the crackle effect. The pink piece had just a light sprinkle of black added where as the blue and orange piece was a heavier coat.

Once I applied the opaque powdered glass layer it was time for sgraffito. Sgraffito is an Italian term for scratching through a top layer to reveal parts of the layer underneath. This needs care as it is quite easy to remove too much of the top layer or mix it up too much especially if you have used more than one opaque colour. You can sgraffito a pattern into the top layer or keep it random. I used both methods on these pieces. The pink and blues were random and the other 2 were a pattern.

Long firing, usually a layer of enamel powder takes more or less 1 minute to fire depending on the metal type, the temperature of the kiln and the composition and thickness of the enamel layer, for crackle these were fired for 3 - 3.5 minutes plus to get the movement I wanted.

Some of the enamel may drip or run over the edges and accumulate on the sides or the backs of the pieces, this happened with these. To tidy them up and to remove the fire sale on the edges, I ran my flex-shaft around the sides and over any sharp bits with a diamond bit, and then hand finished edges with a file. They are now ready for assembly.

The colours used on the blue piece were Thompsons

T Water Blue

T Sea Green

T Crackle Clear

T Water blue

O Sapphire Blue

O Aquamarine Green

Landscape Enamels

This is not just an enameling journey at the moment, I've very recently set up my new  www.picklepotjewellery.com website and that's been a journey so far too. 

Currently I'm trawling through loads of information on Policies, Terms of Use Policies, Privacy Policies, policies policies policies.  So much legal jargon to wade through, its doing my head in. 

More interesting is that I'm also currently working on 4 small enamel landscape pieces for framing.  

I like to concentrate on producing one type of piece at a time so I tend to do multiples of my designs for the chosen type together, rather than spread them out over time, I find this approach really helps me get into the technique that I'm using. 

I'm creating these landscapes using a base of sifted enamels and S.64 enamel paints from Enamel Workshop, I like these painting enamels a lot there's a great colour range and they are lovely to mix and apply. I've tried them with both an oil based medium and a water based medium and for me the oil base works best.  I use lavender oil, bonus, the perfume from it fills my studio with calming vibes.

Once the paints are dry they need to be smoked to burn off the oil before firing, I use my torch for this, slowly applying and removing the heat to allow the smoke to form and dissipate until there is no more smoke. In fact I use my torch for most of the creation of these pieces, especially the small ones,  I'm too impatient to wait for the kiln to come to temperature for the many firings they need, but they do get a final fire polish in the kiln. 

This one is 8.5 x 7 cms, it's probably over maximum size for torch firing but so far so good.  This piece is finished and ready for framing, 3 more pieces to go. 

 

The process of creating these isn't too complicated, just time consuming.  I do them in a similar manner as I would any painting, I plan the design and rough it out, then lay down a basic colour layer, then proceed to work on the details.

For enamels, the copper blank is cut to size, the edges are filed, the back of the blank is given a couple of coats of counter enamel, to prevent it from distorting, then often but not always I apply a coat of white enamel to the front.  

I draw a basic design on the front of the piece and fill that in with sifted enamels in colours that will suit my design, carefully brushing off any escaped grains or overlays.  This forms the base colour layer which may take a few siftings and firings to keep the colour areas distinct, once this has had it's last firing its time to add the details, ie: painting time. 

I have a mix of some beautiful super fine sable brushes and trimmed cheap brushes to use for this. 

There can be several painting layers applied with short firings in between. It's very tempting to go for all the intricate little details from the outset but I've found it best to build up these painted layers from less detailed to the final more detailed layer, you can easily loose the detail if the piece is fired too often, too hot or too long, so less is more in this case, in this way I gradually build up the detail of the piece as it slowly reveals itself.

   

The end result isn't always recognisable as the original design that I had in my mind when I drew the outline but I don't concern myself too much with that,  the piece has evolved as the layers are applied and after it's final fire polish in the kiln it's complete and ready to be framed.

You can see more of these small landscapes in my homewares collection on my website at  picklepotjewellery.com

Where it all started Continued .......

 

Continued.....

I'm not 100% sure now how I actually found enamels, perhaps I bought one of those beautiful coffee table books we saw so many of in those days and was inspired, but I'm very happy that I did find it and now I have endless satisfaction in my work and loads of inspiration for it in the nature around me from my rural environment. 

Around the time I started working with enamels I also did a workshop in large flower painting, you might wonder why? What the connection was for me between a large meter square canvas of, say a rose and a cloisonné rose piece on a 2" copper square, well it was an opportunity to learn some new techniques and approaches, to perhaps get hooked on that instead of enamel.  

I was exploring my options, doing small art is demanding,  getting the size and the subject right, and the technique working to your satisfaction isn't simple, perhaps I though larger work with different medium would be easier or more rewarding. I haven't made that decision yet, both paths provide me with an opportunity to have an artistic direction and to grow in that creative area of my life with lots of options to keep my inquiring mind busy.

I do love creating large flower paintings, I've done a few and will continue with the occasional painting, they are a labor of love, a decent size piece of around that meter square will take me maybe 4 - 6 weeks to complete working 4 hours a day.  Yes the end result is beautiful and very satisfying but it’s a big time commitment and there are only so many walls in my house.  These days I'm enameling more and painting less.

My first attempts at enameling were terrible, it was a huge learning curve, try as i might I couldn't get my first piece passed the sugar stage, wrong torch, wrong heat, wrong timing, wrong thickness, even the wrong colour, Red, which I didn't know at the time is notoriously difficult to get right.  I was so disappointed but I pressed on and over time and many more failures I learned what I was doing wrong and my results have improved.  I've kept that first piece and some of my  many other failures along the way to remind me of where it all started.

I'm not saying I don't have failures anymore, of course I do, plenty of them but when it goes right, which does happen more often now, it's wonderful and so very satisfying to take a piece of bare base metal and create a beautiful piece of jewellery that someone will hopefully treasure.

 I haven't been confident enough yet with Enameling to attempt the really complicated methods like Piqué a Jour but I will have a go at it sometime in the future, I love to experiment with enamels, this blog will be mostly about my enameling journey and where it goes from here.

Where it all started

I've always been a creator, during my career years I worked in old school IT, programming and business analysis etc.  which I've always thought of as a creative endeavor.  I also have an ever expanding interest in cooking, gardening, sewing, photography.

I've been involved with the Tribal bellydance diaspora for many years since around 2005.  During that time as well as running a festival and many events I began importing jewellery,  clothing and accoutrements for costuming for the genre and set up an online store to sell them.

Influenced by my involvement with the tribal community and because I had all these tribal type components coming into my home I began making simple jewellery to add to my store,  that morphed over time through various stages and types of jewellery assembly into handmade copper jewellery.   

I was becoming hooked on jewellery making but something was missing, I was searching for something more than just assembling components, I wanted more artistic input and I was searching for colour, lots and lots of colour.  

I tried lots of patinas for copper, and flame painting copper but that wasn't enough.  

I ended up broadening my search for colour options for copper and I stumbled upon Vitreous Enamels, how fascinating that you can do all these wonderful things with coloured, powdered glass on copper, then I found out about china paints, ceramic stains, glass beads, millefiori, glass rods, lampworked beads, metal foils and silver as a base or as a wire to hold enamels,  a cornucopia of options and methods that can be used with enamels, the list was exciting and endless as is the ongoing learning curve.....

More to come...