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.