Jackie Phillips

As well as being a jeweller Emma is an artist who favours watercolours, and this is her starting point for design inspiration. She uses sketch books to produce quick studies that capture the colours of the east coast of Scotland. Emma brought along several of her sketchbooks and examples of her work on copper and silver. Her regular sketching habit helps her move towards abstract colour and shape, using blues and greens to echo coastal colours and pinks and yellows to reflect sunrises and sunsets. Drawing in more detail led her to the inlay of wire in her work.

How does that transfer to enamel? Emma uses circular, oval or square stencils to move over her sketches to frame an area of a scene for her jewellery pieces. In a separate sketchbook, she then develops and simplifies the scenes for a jewellery piece, usually keeping to a maximum of three colours, using opaques and transparents to create depth.

**For the basecoat Emma usually uses WG Ball Foundation White 7312 on copper (0.9 mm) and WGB Grey 693 on silver (1.0 mm sterling silver for brooches and 1.2 mm fine silver for hand raised bowls). Her go to colours are WGB 7546 Blue Grey and WGB 7449 Grey Green transparent enamels. Emma demonstrated her enamel preparation, adding a teaspoon of enamel into a mortar and pestle, each colour is ground for 10–15 minutes, (take some enamel between your fingers and rub, it should feel smooth, not gritty). As she grinds, she pours the wastewater through a sieve to catch the fines, and each colour is washed three or four times. (**these enamel references have been corrected since the publication of this article in the autumn 2025 journal).

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