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Monthly Team Blog Topic – What Technique Do You Want To Learn Next?

Aspiring Metalsmiths Team Blog Topic – December

What Technique do you want to learn next?

Each month the Aspiring Metalsmiths Team on Etsy chooses a topic and each member responds to the topic on their own blog. Last month the topic was "Show us your Workspace" Check it out if you get a chance.

This month's topic is something that came really easy for me. Because I am so new at this, there are a LOT of techniques that I would like to learn and sometimes am overwhelmed with how much it is that I do not know.

I have always enjoyed drawing and painting. I love working with color and have been since I can remember. When I first started getting into jewelry making with Metal Clay and even after starting to work with Sterling silver and more traditional metalsmithing techniques I knew that I wanted to find a way to incorporate my drawing and painting skills into my work.

This is why I am so excited to learn how to enamel metal. This technique is quite old, and is the art of layering glass powder on metal and then heating it so that the glass melts and sticks to the metal in the desired pattern. Obviously this is a very basic description of the technique and there is a lot more to it than just dunking metal into glass powder, but I am really excited to start to incorporate more color into my metal pieces. There is even glass powder that you can apply similarly to watercolor with firings in the kiln between layers.

I love learning new techniques that help my sketches and ideas become a reality. Each time I pick up a piece of metal I become more familiar with its abilities and work to improve my own techniques and skills. I am excited to start to work with enamels and will post some photos of my endeavor soon.

 

See what others want to learn next. Here are the participating blogs: