Deeply Sculptured Enamelware can be achieved through advanced techniques.
Which is the Darkest Hour of the Night? It’s always the one you’re in. How will you get through this Dark Hour? It’s not a question of what you do, but where you are at the time. Most of the issues in the Dark Hour revolve around what you’re going to do to get through it, and here’s one solution that works when all other solutions fail.
You’re sitting still, right? Actually, the Earth is rotating and traveling around the sun and the sun is traveling around the galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy itself is hurtling around at an astonishing 1.3 million miles an hour, and that’s how fast you’re going when you’re sitting still.
Recently, I’ve been working rather intensely with my Space Age Copper Enamel Boxes, Earrings and Charms, and I’ve been extending the craft into the area of papier-mache boutique boxes. I enamel the tops, using a technique that only I know, but that soon YOU will also know and be able to apply to the craft and the marketplace.
The product is amazingly inexpensive to make, but it is on the other hand very time-consuming and demanding of attention and a high level of presence in order to get a product that is magically delicious and that can be applied to one’s state of meditation as a PASSIVE AGENT.
Passive Agents don’t need to be invoked — they work automatically without the need for renewal or regeneration. I can and do build in CQRs and GENERATORS into items per request. Most of my items go to ordinary boutiques, and they don’t seem to care or notice that the CQRs are incorporated into the design.
I also make many items without CQRs, and they carry Shamanic Instructions in their surfaces, creating numerical and digital construct prayer-forms that work as well as any verbally constated prayer.
Boxes can be constructed with certain properties in mind, such as healing, contact with the higher, inspiration, regeneration, balance, orientation, breathing, sound and more. All the magical essentials are potentially present for those who know the Shamanic Secrets, and for those who don’t yet know, there is the promise of experimental success.
The UTEE is no secret, either. It’s available at most craft outlets and small art supply stores. I use a non-toxic (that’s their claim — I have no way to check up on that) plastic TOPPING and METALLIC EFFECT granule on top of the BLACK GOO, stuff that melts at a particular temperature.
The BLACK BASE goes on first, heated in a sort of kitchen appliance made for this craft, but it’s obvious that it all started in someone’s kitchen, because all the tools are kitchen-style. You get the impression that the result will go on the dining room table, and that might be so.
This plastic granule of various colors is called “UTEE” and all the colors and types of metallics and powders and all the equipment and tools for enameling are easily and readily gotten hold of, and fortunately the craft is popular enough that the makers have survived for several decades now.
In fact, all these enamelware craft products and equipment are available from me — I have a dealer’s license and am a wholesale customer of theirs, but if you want to deal directly with them, go right ahead. I’m clearly not in it for the money. You cannot earn a living from the sale of these time-and-labor-intensive items. You’re welcome to test that prediction.
You can’t make enough of them at the price they’ll sell at, and you certainly can’t make enough to survive on by teaching classes in enamelware to make a dent in your rent, as they used to say, back in the day.
Jeez, I’m getting all rhymed out here, must be on a poetic streak, I’d venture to guess if I didn’t know better — it’s just the way it came out. Total freak chance that the words rhymed or made sense at all.
What I mean is, by this time you should realized that the universe operates by statistics — it’s statistically correct that what you’re reading right now will make some sense to you, but it doesn’t necessarily make the same sense to someone else — that’s philosophy in a nutshell.
Nobody cares two figs whether it makes sense or not, and that right there is the Secret of Life itself, or the recipe for marketing, I can’t remember which.
So these granules come in BLACK and CLEAR and a host of wild colors and effects, including some spectacular metallic and interference color effects — WOW are they spectacular and sensational — they knock anybody out who sees them, and this is a property of the material, not some special artistic action that I apply.
LESS IS MORE is really the ticket with enamels. The colors and effects pile up rapidly if they’re on top of each other, and there isn’t typically a lot of space on which to work — these are relatively small items, although I can make a solid copper plate or bowl as large as 11″ in diameter, and have done so many times with this material. Tricky, but it can be done.
The ideal size for a copper bowl is about 3″ in diameter — I work with standard sizes and shapes, although I have a few oddball shapes in my copper stockroom. I like to work at around that three-inch size, because it lends itself well to the medium, meaning that the patterns work out best at around that size.
The very first trick is getting your base melted. Pour enough BLACK UTEE into the heating pan to fill it ALMOST to the top, but leave a little room for the melting process — you can always add more later, and in fact, you’ll be adding BLACK UTEE to the mix fairly frequently if you have any work-load at all.
There’s a couple of natural blockages that will slow you down and make rapid production almost impossible, but achievable through the use of multiple blowers and melting pots. A blower is only good for a few items at a time, then needs to be left to cool for about 20 minutes or more.
I use two blowers alternately to avoid destroying a blower. Even though these are relatively cheap and I do have a half-dozen of them on hand as ready spares when — not if — the blower blows up on me, or just goes quiet and cold about halfway through a job.
The main secret about the BLACK BASE UTEE is that it needs to be stirred rather constantly to mix in the top scum layer that forms when the material is cooled by the air. You can keep the thing covered when you aren’t dipping, but it’s a pain in the ass to constantly uncover the thing, so stir it once in a while — you’ll have to stir it frequently anyway, even if you cover it, so just keep stirring, keep the whole mass liquid and flowing.
DIPPING is another area where there are a few secrets and more than one subtlety. When the BLACK UTEE is nicely melted, you can DIP an item. You dip the thing in with the part you want covered in enamel held DOWN toward the melted enamel.
You’ll note that the entire surface is covered with BLACK UTEE, and if it isn’t, you’ll have to keep dipping it until it does, keeping in mind that this stuff is highly additive, meaning that it will get VERY thick VERY fast, so you have at most three tries to get it right.
If you don’t get it right, you just settle the item down into the usual HOT SPOT where you cook the enamel into the right temperature to receive the FLASH GRANULES that make the design on the BLACK background.
You can use a stick, the wrong end of a cheap brush you aren’t using anyway, or a small non-stick spatula to keep the stuff flowing and liquid, at about the same consistency you’d want for a thick gravy or a rich pudding. Like I said, this craft obviously originated in somebody’s kitchen.
When you DIP the item, make sure that the excess runs off. If you hold a sharp part or any part that sticks out at the bottom, the extra melt will drip off — presumably back into the melting pot, not onto your table or work pads.
Speaking of work pad, you’ll need a special non-stick pad that you get from the same company that makes the UTEE. You’ll want two or three backup pads. They come rolled up in a slim box that stores easily and takes up very little room.
You’ll also want a backup supply of BLACK and/or CLEAR background material. What’s the difference? You’ll use the BLACK for most projects, but only the CLEAR for projects on actual metal, such as copper bowls, plates and other metal items, to allow the metal to show through.
The effect is amazing, and if you’ve never seen copper enamel work close up and personal, you’ll be absolutely stunned by it. There’s nothing like it in the world or out of it. You won’t believe the results, and as I said, if you’ve never seen it in person, you will be astonished.
Once you have DIPPED the item, such as a boutique box top, holding it upside down by the side with a pair of jewelry tweezers, not the ones that the UTEE company provides, which is worthless unless you have nothing better to do than muck about with a clumsy tool, the important point here is to SWIPE the bottom of the DIPPED TOP, to encourage extra material to come away from the bottom area. You swipe it gently and briefly on an unused portion of the nonstick mat — I like to do this on the lower right side, where I don’t use the blower.
Now is the critical moment. It is vital that you IMMEDIATELY position the blower over the DIPPED AREA, moving the blower back and forth to accommodate a larger surface if the item is not small enough — only experience personally experienced will tell you the story here. Eventually, you’ll figure it out, and in the meantime, you’ll have lots of Learning Experiences, meaning you can’t even give away the product you made, it’s so bad.
After a while, it all smooths out and things sort themselves out and stuff gets done right, but that’s assuming that you’re learning, not just robotically repeating the same mistakes over and over again, which is the story of most peoples’ lives, so don’t let yourself fall into that category.
Inquire, find out, poke about, learn what this stuff can do, invent new things with it that nobody has ever done — with a new Space Age product that hardly anyone has ever seen, even the craftiest of artists, it isn’t hard to be The First To Do Something Amazing.
It is so important to get that heating blower onto the melt IMMEDIATELY and keep it there until the melt actually melts, flows and looks ready to accept the powders. If the melt is not ready, the powders will blow off the surface of your item. They need to stick to the melted BLACK that’s already on the product.
By the way, you’ll want to WORRY the material — prod it about looking for hidden air pockets and holes — before you decide that it’s ready to accept the powders. You can achieve a LUNAR SURFACE effect by allowing the bubbles to burst and leave craters, sometimes large and sometimes small and sometimes both, in the BLACK surface.
You’ll note that the blower isn’t a hair-dryer kind of blower, although it’s the same technology and a hair-dryer company makes it to order, but it has a very specific temperature and doesn’t blow hard. An ordinary dryer would blow the granules all over the planet. Slow and steady at the exact right temperature does the trick.
As a matter of fact, that’s a key point. The temperatures at which you’re working are far, far below those of glass enamel, in which you’d be using a small high-fire ceramic type kiln with special properties and a special temperature indicator and controls, but basically the same as you’d use to fire and glaze ceramics, which is more or less the same stuff as glass, which is basically melted sand.
The Space Age granules melt at around 300 degrees, I’m guessing. Somewhere someone has posted the exact temperatures, and I’m ready to be corrected on the issue, but the point here is that, although you can burn yourself rather seriously by extreme stupidity, it’s really, really hard to hurt yourself with this equipment and craft.
That having been said, watch somebody blow themselves up with an enamel project. The fact that you don’t use a kiln is why I’m interested in this material and have taken up its usage and have championed it as a great crafting product for those who want the thrill of copper enameling without the hassle and risk of a high-fire kiln.
Keeping the blower on the piece, you’ll raise it slightly to accommodate the move when you add particles of color and metallics onto the BLACK background, which is presumably nicely melted as you’re adding these finishing touches and embellishments.
Ah, now comes the SECRET of SECRETS. It’s all about the WHITE.
Notice that I didn’t say “NON-INTERFERENCE BLUE”, nor did I say “PEARL” or “GRAY” or indeed any variation, commutation or permutation of “WHITE” — when I say WHITE I mean WHITE and nothing else will do. I stress this because several dozen of my students have had a hard time understanding this point.
WHITE particles behave differently. They have a very wild dispersion flow, very much resembling the front end of a brand-new lava flow, or the natural wild look of the Fjords of Norway or the swamps of Florida — flow outward, spreading until they meet resistance or have grown too cold to flow.
Each WHITE particle can expand amazingly widely, and extreme restriction must be applied when using the WHITE to create finishing touches such as the STAR FIELD effect I use quite a lot in my invocational boxes, the ones you use to store things on your Altar.
This craft involves HEAT, and although it’s not DANGEROUSLY HOT, it requires CONSTANT ATTENTION without a break, not a single break, in the attention, while the product is being worked. This means YOU.
You can’t get away with scattered attention or wandering attention or lapse in attention. It’s a job to make one of these things, no doubt about it, and the effort creates a definite strain.
You watch the effect of heating the granules, and you’ll note that each color has its own rate of flow and type of flow-expansion at the crest of the flow. There’s a lot to see, and a lot to remember about the variety of effects that can be obtained from the same stuff.
Working the ANGLE of the blower makes a whalloping difference. You can control the SHAPE of the flow and the wrap around the edges, all sorts of very small subtle things will change with the way you hold and work the blower, just like hairdressing.
Again, this craft started in somebody’s kitchen, and you’d expect a hairdryer somewhere around the house, sometimes the kitchen, sometimes the bedroom, sometimes the bathroom — and by golly, here it is, another standard household item that any house person would recognize, except as I said before, the heat is a LOT higher, and the fan is a LOT slower than you’d find in most home style hairdryers, although pro dryers are likelier to have controls for speed and temperature for smart operators.
Dummies get the standard one-speed or two-speed model, and learn to accept their limitations. The dryer you’ll be using for this craft is not the same dryer you have in your bathroom.
I tend to use about 12-15 particles of WHITE on my earrings and smaller boxes, and no more than 23 on a larger piece, unless it’s to feature the WHITE effect, in which case, I watch carefully as I add small amounts bit by bit and heat them up with the blower.
Just slightly after you’ve achieved the result you wanted, you’ll maybe have the sense to pull the blower away from the piece. Eventually, you’ll learn when the “TOO MUCH HEAT” formula has been met or exceeded. In short, you’ll ruin a few before you find the right touch and timing — the first pancake is always a lump.
Now comes a critical stage, where you’ll move the piece slightly to remove excess chunks that might have crawled to the bottom edge of the crafted item. You must be careful to not get the tweezers stuck in the melted goo, because it can create a really serious mess by the time you dig it out of that Tar Baby — it seems to grab anything and suck it into a blob.
Blobbing up is not what you want, and you need to guard against it at all stages of the crafting of enamelware.
I have created large frameable pieces using this technique, often dipping and painting the BLACK GOO on a little at a time, keeping everything hot under the blower at all times, of course, not an easy task. If the piece is too large, you can’t keep it hot enough in all places at once, and must sacrifice some flow somewhere.
FINISHING the piece can involve putting a pin or a magnet on the back of a flat piece, or wiring it as an earring. Boxes can be finished by a rapid flow on the edges, using the blower to achieve this rounded effect by angling the blower at about 45 degrees to the top edge of the box.
BOWLS can be finished by SLOWLY working each area, not expecting to keep the whole thing hot, but at least WARM while this finishing process is going on.
BOTTOM LINE: Nobody said this was an easy craft, except in the most crude applications. To achieve a sophisticated and elegant look, you’ll have to master a number of things, including your own attention and ability to discern ongoing events, in the sense of being able to see the FLASH POINT of an expansion flow BEFORE it happens!
There are a LOT of things to learn about enamelware, especially the New Age kind of enamelware, and time is flowing through your fingers like grains of sand. Get to work now, while there’s still time and you still have the hand and eye skills needed to perform this type of work.
You can order a large variety of signed handmade enamelware that I’ve produced or I can custom-make something to your specifications and invocational needs — boxes for incense, candles, oils and all sorts of Altar items are easy for me to invent and craft up for you, and I have every imaginable type of UTEE enamel crafting products right here in stock. ALL PRICES ARE RETAIL. Your price would be HALF of the stated price.
- SMALL BOXES $35 — You can specify a color and a shape — round, square, heart-shaped. This box is quite small, and would be good for earrings, rings, something rather tiny.
- MEDIUM BOXES $49 — Nice size for slightly larger Altar items.
- LARGE BOXES $125 — Depending on the size of the box, I might affix an applique rather than try to heat the entire top of a large box.
- COMPUTER MAGNET $35 — Small shaped enamelware with a magnetic backing.
- WEARABLE PIN $85 — Comes with a mounted pin for fashion ornamentation.
- SMALL COPPER BOWLS $450 — Standard size, about 2 1/2″ to 3″ in diameter.
- LARGER BOWLS on commission only, up to 11″ in diameter.
As I mentioned, I also frame some of the larger and more difficult and complex pieces — they fit nicely in a SHADOW BOX type of frame, although for the flat pieces on board, I like to FLOAT-MOUNT them within a high series of cut framing boards to make a great-looking display that is never the same two seconds in a row.
FRAMED ARTWORK will vary in price greatly, according to how good the piece is, more than by the size of the piece, which is how the public grades art. How big is it, and how famous is the painter? Those two questions should never arise and in the intelligent and experienced art buyer, they don’t.
I wish I could show you a catalog of available pieces, but I frankly don’t have the time to photograph pieces — by the time they’re up online, they’ve sold, so the effort is largely wasted. These things tend to leave my studio as fast as I can make them — I’m lucky to have saved a few for the photo studio so you can get SOME idea of what they look like, and I’ll get those photos up online as soon as I’m able.
I should mention that I also perform this same process on hardwood items such as pencil boxes and keepsake boxes, and I’m able to apply enamel to an amazingly wide variety of crafted items, so keep tuned — I have a professional cutter that will produce thousands of different SHAPES that can be worked, everything from animals to children at play, and they can be made into PINS, BADGES, BOX TRIMMINGS, and even PAPER ARTS such as SCRAPBOOKING, for which the technique is unexcelled.
BODY ORNAMENTATION is achievable with a variety of adhesives intended for skin application. I have made a few BINDHI DOTS and, well, I should take a moment to explain what a Bindi Dot is. The word “Dot” is added in English to make it make sense to the Western ear, but the word “Bindhi” is in fact translated as “Dot”, which would make “Bindhi Dot” come out “Dot Dot”, pretty much like Pizza Pie (pie-pie) and Torpenhow Hill, which translates out as “Hill-Hill-Hill-Hill” with a succession of invader wordsplastered onto the word “hill”.
It may be a matter of some interest to some folks living in the U.K. actually on the Isle of Albion, that the town of Torpenhow — pronounced by the locals “Trup-en-ah” — hosts Strawberry Teas Barbeques and Social Evenings at the village hall, completed in 2003.
Gosh, we’ve strayed quite far from enamelware, haven’t we? Not at all, although it may seem so. Social clubs that teach and practice enamelware would be a terrific boon to some areas. Enamelware is unusual enough to cause a spark of interest, and an exhibit at a local bank, post office or hospital would be inexpensive and easy to mount, even with the low weight restrictions that are applied at hospital installations — in one case the limit for a hanging piece was 1/2 pound, not enough to frame it, and more than the plexi would weigh. You develop skills at handling weight issues in art installations if you do them enough, and we do.
One of my favorite enamel pieces is one that got mounted in a very fancy 17th century carved gilded wood frame. I have lots of those for my Rembrant etchings, and they look GREAT around one of these enamel pieces. The prices vary for these elegant and rare antique frames, from around $600 for 19th century pieces to upward of $35,000 for the very rare 17th century frames.
I have a few original oil paintings that are in the original 17th and 18th century frames, and those are the easiest to sell, because they are very unlikely to be modern forgeries, especially if the framing has not been disturbed for several centuries, a rare occurrence, but one for which I look when buying rare original art.
If anyone wants to own a completely unique original Renoir, I am ready to sell it for the price of an ashram — $300,000 in cash, which is all I’ll need right now to get the land and start operating our Spiritual Rehab Retreat.
There are so many applications to the enamelware that I could easily spend a few more hours listing and explaining them, but take it as an indication that you could produce clock or watch faces, medallions, Altar items of all sorts, along with every kind of applique you can figure out and craft up — it’s endless, limited only by your imagination.
Okay, back to work I go … I’ve let my enamel blower cool down plenty. If anyone is interested in learning this craft, you need to tell me so. If there’s enough interest, I’ll schedule a weekend or one-day online workshop to teach the basics of the craft.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby