1, tire manufacturing:
Cloisonne products include bottles and jars that are more decorative than practical, as well as people, animals and fruits that are purely used for decoration. No matter what kind of product, the carcass should be made first, and then decorated with cloisonne. There are only a few kinds of tires that can be made by machine, and many shapes still need to be made by hand or semi-hand.
To make tires, you must first make molds. After the mold is made, the copper plate (usually copper) is cut to make the carcass. If it is machined, it is easier to achieve a regular and symmetrical shape.
If it is cut, hammered and welded by hand or semi-hand, it will be very difficult and require rich operating experience and good technical level. The most difficult thing is to ensure the uniform thickness of the carcass. Otherwise, the enamel glaze will crack due to different expansion degrees during the firing process.
2. Silk:
After the carcass is completed, copper wire patterns need to be made and bonded, which is called "wire clamping". When making silk, the cylindrical copper wire should be pressed into flat wire. Works of different sizes should use copper wires of different widths.
3. Silk:
Some irregular patterns need to be bent by a single copper wire, while regular and uniform patterns are bent by combining several copper wires. Usually 6, 8 or 10 filaments are bonded together side by side with pigskin fat according to the size of the filaments and the complexity of the pattern. In the handicraft era, parallel copper wires were evenly wound on straws, and then pigskin was painted on the surface of the copper wires.
After drying, take it off and cut it into required length. 1958, a silk reeling machine was developed. It can save a part of labor, improve the efficiency by 50% and make the silk more uniform.
4. Catch flowers:
Cut a set of pasted wires into the required length, and then bend them into the required pattern line shape with tools. This method is called "wire breaking". Broken flowers are purely manual, requiring keen vision, accurate understanding of patterns, skilled mastery of tools and skilled operation. Broken flowers can only be used if they are burned in the fire, because the flexibility of copper wire becomes worse during the breaking process, and it is not easy to stick to the substrate.
After annealing, the flexibility becomes better, and the attached grease marks can be removed, so that silk flower can be easily separated. Finally, separate the pattern lines one by one and stick them on the tire with bletilla striata.
5. Flowers:
Also called silk sticking, the broken flowers are separated one by one and then stuck to the designated position of the carcass. Filaments are not strong only by bonding, and welding is needed to enhance their firmness. This process is usually carried out twice to ensure that the filaments are firmly welded in the carcass.
6. Flat fire:
The surface of the welded carcass is covered with impurities formed by burnt flux and bletilla striata. If it is not removed, there will be sand holes formed by bubbles on the color surface, which need to be boiled with dilute sulfuric acid. Either way, the shredded carcass must be cooked to a pinkish silvery white. The above-mentioned series of operations may cause local deformation of the carcass, so it must be reshaped, which is called "flat living".
7, point blue:
The pigment used in cloisonne is enamel glaze Adding proper amount of cosolvent and colorant into enamel glaze can become colored enamel glaze with different colors. The process of filling the glaze into the silk tire is called "point blue" and point blue. It is necessary to shovel the glaze into the silk gap a little with a special long-handled blue gun and suck the glaze with a glass straw.
8, burning blue:
Burn it after the first painting. The pigment will shrink after sintering, so it turns blue for the second time and burns again, which is called "lighting two fires". It is not enough to burn two fires for some products. It takes three or even four fires to complete.
9. Polishing:
The product must be polished to make the glaze smooth and the copper wire evenly exposed. When polishing, use diamond sand first, then cloth wheel, and finally wipe it with charcoal.
10, design:
Cloisonne design is like dancing in chains. Under the restriction of complex technology, it is difficult to show aesthetic feeling. For example, due to the limitation of enamel glaze, there should not be a large area of block surface, otherwise it is easy to crack, and the pattern should be trimmed more, so that the enamel glaze with metal edges will be stable.
Another example is that numerous wire decorations make the production time-consuming. In order to improve production efficiency, it is necessary to design some repetitive patterns to realize local batch operation in manual production. The form of single pattern is the core of the whole design. A good single pattern, whether it is continuous in two directions, continuous in four directions or laid loosely, will not feel monotonous.