Enamel Cross Project (part 2)

Enamel Cross Project (part 2)

Working with the bottom section, I cleaned the surface of the metal and painted on Chinese White. This allows me to draw the design in pencil onto the surface of the metal. Here's the main part of the design, without the border crosses.

 

Here's a photo of the design cut into the metal and the border crosses painted on. I also cut out the stem of the cross to make sure I could get the join between the bottom and stem pieces nice and neat:

lower mid interface of the cross

lower-mid connected together

After many hours of engraving I came to this:

lower piece join as seen from the side

I was going to go ahead and enamel it but then thought I should, at least, finish the stem section near to the join. I need to get the widths of the circle borders right on both joining sections. So here's the stem section of the cross with the design all marked out:

Next design drawn on the stem

This section has quite a few complicated design features, in particular the rose on the right-hand-side. I'm relatively new to engraving and this will certainly be good practice! Here's how the cross is looking so far:

stem joined on the the bottom piece to see what it's like

After many hours of cutting away metal I've got to this stage:

stem rose design cut and finished

There were 84 petals, in total, to cut for the rose. I found getting a clean cut on the insides of curves to be very tricky. Somehow I managed it but couldn't really tell you how I did it! Most of the cutting is done with knife-shaped gravers, sometimes with a pointed bottom and sometimes flat. I try to use as large a flat bottomed knife-edged graver as possible to flatten out the recess cuts. If I were doing basse-taille enamelling technique, with transparent enamels, this would be more important to get a good relective surface off the metal to come through the enamel from behind.

The next post will be in a couple of weeks and hopefully should show some good progress!

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