Cloisonné

I have posted too many time to count about being exhausted, but tonight I am REALLY exhausted! Class started at 9:00 this morning, and with the exception of a break for lunch and a break for dinner I went until 9:30 tonight. Ricky Frank is a very laid-back instructor who wants us to internalize what we're doing and why so we aren't moving fast (this isn't a whip-out-as-many-pieces as you can and push to your limit kind of class). But fast or slow doesn't matter when you get into the 12-hour range.

It is also very humbling to be starting something brand new and to have to suck at it just like every other beginner. Sure I work with glass all the time, and enamel is glass, but it's also metal. And it's glass in a super-color-saturated form. Between the intensity of the color, and the way the glass and the metal behave together during firing, I am having to learn a whole bunch of new principles.

The cloisonné wire looked so big up on the monitor when he was demonstrating, and of course he just whipped it around into perfect shapes with walls perpendicular to the base. When I was mangling it with my tweezers and my ginormous sausage hands (everyone has ginormous sausage hands in comparison to the wire size), it wasn't easy AT ALL. I managed--after three tries--to get two wires embedded into the enamel on the top of one slightly domed piece. I should have reiterated I mangled after three tries to get two wires embedded...

But I ended the day with several prepped pieces (white enamel on the front and a counter layer on the back of copper discs), a red color tile, a prepped piece with cloisonné wire embedded in it ready for enameling tomorrow, a black and white piece for illustrating contrast, and a couple of pieces with transparent enamels on silver foil to try blending. Two of my pieces had too much enamel on the front and not enough countering it on the back so large pieces of the enamel flaked off the front.

Anyway it's all a learning experience, and I have learned that my eyelids MUST close now. I can't even re-read this post to edit it. Sorry.