Final enameled pieces

These are my two final, and probably most ambitious, thin-metal enameling samples. Not to be content with the only relatively unstable pieces I had made so far, I decided to do a ridiculously flimsy one out of painfully thin metal, and fire it about ten times.

This first one is all of my sketchbook scribbled fantasies come to life, namely, me on my future lyra. My class notes are messy with sketches on me on a hoop, it made a lot of sense to turn it into an enamel piece.

This was the last one I did, yesterday. Again, born of idle sketching and figures that tend to crop up in my drawing. I'm not thrilled with it, but it felt good to get one final piece out before I had to say goodbye to enameling forever.

Enameling! You're probably sick of it by now, but I'm sure as hell not

Following my tentative experiments with enameling thin metal onto pieces yesterday, I threw myself into it with absolutely no thoughts of how cut up I was about to get today. Octopods! Sparrows! Other iconic images that are easily sheared out of metal! The list goes on.

I initially approached it like cutting out stencils, but I quickly realized that because metal /= paper, there was no need to avoid going into negative space by cutting through connections. Which is good, because piercing and shearing out metal that thin would have been a hassle.

Doing the colors on the octopus was entirely too fun. I almost made it purple, but I restrained myself.

This one I made with my aerial teacher, who goes by Sparrow, in mind. The wing tips got a bit banged up because of the fragility, but it's holding together surprisingly well for being so delicate.

The Medusa is the first piece I did with two layers. I wanted to distinguish between the snakes and the profile, so I built up the snakes with a few layers of wetpacked enamel. I even left my transparent enamel comfort zone and touched it with some opaque to get the depth.

Tomorrow- this madness, in its finished enameled form. And meditations on the end of my relationship with the fine metals studio.

Enameling samples

New enameling pieces! I've been working non-stop in the studio because this is the last week we have open hours before it shuts down until fall. I was too sick to put these up yesterday, so today I'm posting the first and second layers of these two little sets.

I made the freaking cool discovery that I could enamel pieces of thin metal to a base when I was messing around, so all of these are experiments along those lines. I cut the tree out of 22 gauge, and fluxxed it to the base.

Same for this one- every subsequent layer of enamel adheres it more strongly.

And this was mostly an excuse to use up my leftover scraps of thin metal.

Day two! I've done about 5-10 layers on each of these pieces at this point.

The tree turned into an experiment with painting on klyrfire in patterns and tapping off the excess enamel.

I wetpacked the fishy to give it some dimension, and messed around with creating a blue gradation.

And with this one I just kept fluxxing it to build up dimension.

Apologies for the brevity, my sinuses are interfering with my writing-brain. Possibly I will cast myself a new nose in studio today.

Cloisonné Pear and Skull

If I kept going with the "enameling is my new significant other" metaphor, cloisonne would be that hot thing they do with their tongue. Or in less sexy metaphorical terms, cloisonne is the technique of melting thin metal strips into enamel to create boundaries (check it out!) that you can then wetpack with enamel. I'm a little in love with it right now.

These were my first two cloisonne tests from today- I've been dying to try it out, but I've been intimidated by the process. I even have silver cloisonne wire to work with, although I did these with thin strips of 22 gauge copper for testing purposes.

Skull! I had this design banging around my sketchbook from last term, and it seemed simple enough to fashion out of thin metal. Gave myself a nice slice with the metal when I was trying to straighten it out with my thumb, which'll show me to use my meat implements on metalstuffs. I spent the rest of studio time trying to keep glass dust and shards from breaching my usually awesome bodily defenses that keep that shit on the outside. Not even my ninja bandaids were up to the challenge :(

This was a fun abstract piece that I decided looked like a pear once I was done. I love how enamel gives me license to play with colors abstractly- I used citroen yellow and olive cuz they spoke to me from the enamel cabinet. I roughly enameled a jump ring to the top of it after I accidentally closed the drilled hole, which I'm going to have to get more careful about.

The back- straight transparent olive enamel on metal, no flux. I've been getting into utilizing the backs of pieces to experiment with colors I'd want on the front and I've been getting some interesting results.

In conclusion, cloisonne and I are going to need some "alone time" with the kiln over the next week. Awwww yeah.