| I often set up the camera to take shots of the pieces as they go along.
I had an interesting experience recently designing a special order.
Champleve as a technique has many limitations. I have to be careful how deep I etch, what I use to counter-enamel, what colours I put next to each other, how thick the lines are, how the lines curve etc. But I have been using this technique for many years, and have achieved a certain comfort level with it. So when a customer asked me to design a piece based on a dream she had had, I dropped right into my usual design mode.
There were three basic elements to the dream - which were in themselves fairly abstract, and the client wanted to keep it simple. There had been a deep red bowl against a dark blue ground with e green cross emerging from the bowl. Simple - right? But after working and reworking these elements I was still unsatisfied.
    
I just couldn't seem to give the shapes life. I thought long and hard about how I might be able to use shading to create more of a sense of the bowl, and then all of a sudden the penny dropped. With all the limitations that champleve has - it does NOT have to be flat! Why don't I make an actual bowl? So I did a bit of a mock up with some copper scrap I had: this is two separate pieces.
  
I had been fooled into thinking that champleve needed to be flat simply because I hadn't needed it to be anything else until now. Finally the piece started to feel like it had some power. It had been over a year since I took my silversmithing class - but I thought I could manage what I wanted with the simple tools I had in the studio. At first I thought of riveting the pieces together, but later the KISS principle seemed a better plan (KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid) so I decided just to hang both pieces from the same holes
    
You can see that the hammering process caused the sides to pull in at the centre, so I deliberately made it larger than I needed so that I could trim the edges straight.
I waited until after etching to cut around the cross
 
I spent a fair amount of time experimenting with colour. Red is a very difficult colour to control (apparently this is true in glass blowing as well). There are also certain tension problems I had to deal with - but layering the red over a dark brown seemed to produce the results I was looking for, both technically and aesthetically.
I was particularly stumped by the green, as all the shades I created seemed to make the piece seem garish. I talked to the client again, and she described the green she had in mind as the greenish grey of weathered wood - and suddenly everything fell into place.
The finished piece is only about 1 1/4" square. I am now thinking of designing a line of pieces with a bowl in the back, possibly based on runes. It's has opened up a whole new range of ideas; that's the exciting thing about process! |
