Since by now I was in love with the aqua blue transparent enamel on fine silver, I prepared another rectangle of the silver but only 0.5mm thick, and textured it as before with an automatic centre punch, producing a crude heart design. Then I bent some filigree wire into the same heart-shaped design and applied it to the sheet to lie flat. This time also, I bent the wire so that the larger dimension of the cross section was made to lie parallel to the sheet, so that on sanding, the filigree wouldn't tend to fall apart. In the previous effort, it had stood up the other way on the backing sheet, making it too tall, and also prone to falling apart at the links if sanded thinner.
Some washed aqua blue enamel powder was drifted into the design and fired until it melted; but alas, by now the fine silver was too fine to allow rough handling (e.g. during sanding or stoning of the surface) so that bits of the enamel were prone to crack off. I solved this by cracking the majority of it off by a mixture of flexing and quenching from dull red heat, then domed the ensemble of heart and backing sheet, using an ordinary doming punch and doming block. This had the wonderful side effect of 'pin cushioning' the heart design into the filigree.
The domed design was then re-filled with enamel and fired, with very pleasing results. Not perfect, but interesting. For the sake of some colour contrast, I drifted 'nectarine' enamel round the outside, removing surplus from the blue or raised silver areas with a fine brush, and re-fired.
Final step - removing the sharp corners of the domed rectangular sheet, since the doming process had turned the corners into sharp spikes.
Overall opinion - a bit amateurish, but there are many possibilities for improvement:
- use a border of silver wire to contain the nectarine colour
- form a small heart in brass, roll this together with fine silver sheet in a sandwich to emboss the design into the sheet instead of the doming block method
- mitre the ends of the fine silver filigree wire so they don't form such an ugly angle
P.S. The picture above is larger than life size - the actual size is about that of a UK 5p piece.
Some washed aqua blue enamel powder was drifted into the design and fired until it melted; but alas, by now the fine silver was too fine to allow rough handling (e.g. during sanding or stoning of the surface) so that bits of the enamel were prone to crack off. I solved this by cracking the majority of it off by a mixture of flexing and quenching from dull red heat, then domed the ensemble of heart and backing sheet, using an ordinary doming punch and doming block. This had the wonderful side effect of 'pin cushioning' the heart design into the filigree.
The domed design was then re-filled with enamel and fired, with very pleasing results. Not perfect, but interesting. For the sake of some colour contrast, I drifted 'nectarine' enamel round the outside, removing surplus from the blue or raised silver areas with a fine brush, and re-fired.
Final step - removing the sharp corners of the domed rectangular sheet, since the doming process had turned the corners into sharp spikes.
Overall opinion - a bit amateurish, but there are many possibilities for improvement:
- use a border of silver wire to contain the nectarine colour
- form a small heart in brass, roll this together with fine silver sheet in a sandwich to emboss the design into the sheet instead of the doming block method
- mitre the ends of the fine silver filigree wire so they don't form such an ugly angle
P.S. The picture above is larger than life size - the actual size is about that of a UK 5p piece.
No comments:
Post a Comment