Joan Bolton King

Jewellery enamel suppliers offer a bewilderingly wide selection of enamels. At its simplest working with opaque and transparent colours might be compared with painting with oils and watercolours, the latter being more demanding because one can see through each layer to what lies beneath. Most enamels are either opaque or transparent. As an opaque enamel covers whatever is underneath, be it another colour or the copper, it is easier to start learning with them. Nevertheless, it is only the lack of transparency which distinguishes the opaque enamels and their artistic use.

The first of this series outlined how to coat a copper blank with enamel, but it would look much better with some decoration, and here some of the commercially supplied decorative media can come in useful. The enamel powder used for sifting is just finely ground glass and the colours can also be bought in lump form, as smaller chips or in a multitude of regular shapes. A small quantity of some mixed coloured chips, beads and threads will start you off admirably. Threads are thin rods of glass pulled out of a molten lump; and one word of warning: - most beads sold in haberdashery departments are not glass!

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