Category archives: Enamel Tests

After the ground-coat it's time for the white opaque enamel. It's pretty much the same process as for the ground-coat.

Before I enamel the ellipse I wan't to do some tests. For this I'm cutting out some small rectangles 74mm x 52mm (this is A8 paper size).

My pallet tends to grow a bit, here is the state of things after I'm mid-way through the enamelling. It's best not to expand too much, especially for a graphical piece. Although, having said that, the Amazon frog is partially graphical and partially a painting so all rules are out!

This is an experimental project to see if adding a border ring to a domed silver disc improves the overall result of the finished enamel. When I created the set of enamel doorknobs I didn't add a border ring, so the cloisonné wires had to be ground back to be quite thin near the perimeter of the piece where the enamel became thinner, or in some cases, left with a slightly non-smooth surface. This doorknob (above) shows the problem, albeit minor, but to the perfectionist something to improve!

I've been testing out how to create a border of crosses. The idea is to have a band of red enamel with small crosses along the band - giving a medieval look. Here's my experiment!

I've been experimenting with some champlevé and basse-taille enamelling. This entwining pattern is taken from a medieval enamel religious design. The samples, moving from left to right, respectively, are: a champlevé piece on standard brass, a basse-taille piece on fine silver, a cloissoné piece with fine silver wires on fine silver and, lastly, a champlevé piece on copper.

A couple of people have asked me if I could upload a higher resolution picture of the enamel tests than I did in my previous post as the numbers and names were not visible. If you right click on the above image and select view image (or just press 'Crtl' and '+' to magnify) then you will see the image at its maximum resolution. This photo was taken outside without a flash so it should give a better representation of the colours under natural light.

These are the set of enamel colours that I got from Milton Bridge's British Enamels set. It was quite a lot of work but worth doing. I've got an order for some cloisonné work and need some compatible non-painting colours. The top three rows are the transparent enamels and the bottom two rows the opaque.