Enamel Color Confidence
Learn to trust your enamel color decisions in

Ricky’s Enamel Color Studio

A 5-Day "in person" workshop
​in Ricky's Marietta, GA home studio
that helps you learn to
​Think in Enamel Color Layers

Questions every enamel artist eventually faces

How do I become fluent with enamel color?
How do I begin thinking naturally in layers, light, and color relationships?

How do I trust my color decisions?
So I can explore freely without worrying about choosing the “right” colors.

​How does a personal color voice emerge?
Through curiosity, experimentation, and noticing what truly resonates.​

​Ricky’s Enamel Color Studio is designed to help artists explore these questions through guided experimentation, conversation, and small enamel studies..

Is This You?

Many enamel artists experience moments like these in the studio:

• You feel overwhelmed by color choices.
• You hesitate because you’re afraid of making the wrong color decision.
• You have learned techniques but still feel uncertain about how to use color creatively.
• You want your work to feel more personal, but you’re not sure how to get there.
• You sometimes feel stuck when deciding what to do next with color.
These experiences are very common.
Most artists are taught techniques, but very few are taught how to develop confidence with color decisions.
This workshop is designed to help you make that shift.

The Shift This Workshop Helps You Make

Instead of trying to find the right colors, you begin learning how to explore color with curiosity and confidence.
Instead of worrying about making the perfect piece, you begin making small studies that reveal how color behaves.
Instead of feeling pressure to make the correct decision, you begin discovering what you personally prefer.
And something important happens.
You begin to feel a sense of freedom with color.
Freedom to explore.
Freedom to change things.
Freedom to combine colors and marks in new ways.
Because you are no longer trying to find the “right” color decision.
You are learning how to discover color through exploration.

How the Workshop Works

The workshop unfolds through a simple five-day exploration of enamel color — designed to help you move from uncertainty to confidence with color.
At your own pace, each day combines enamel exploration, guided conversation, and small studies.

Day 1 — Making Enamel Color

Understanding how enamel, metal, and heat work together to create color.

Day 2 — Six Enamel Color Layer Styles

Exploring six ways enamel color layers can be built and how layering changes color.

Day 3 — Making Enamel Color Design Elements

Developing a vocabulary of enamel color marks: lines, shapes, patterns, and light.

​Day 4 — Changing and Combining Color Marks

Exploring how enamel color marks interact, overlap, and begin forming images

​​Day 5 — Discovering Personal Color Questions

Turning curiosity into small studies that reveal your own color direction.

A Small Group Mentoring Experience

A small group studio experience where each artist explores their own enamel color questions.

This workshop is intentionally limited to four students.

In many ways it becomes a form of small-group personal mentoring.
Instead of everyone following identical instructions, students are encouraged to explore their own color questions.

Daily conversations allow students to share discoveries, challenges, and ideas while learning from each other’s explorations. Watching how another artist explores a question often opens unexpected possibilities for your own work.
​
Because of this small group format, the workshop can meet each artist where they are — whether you are beginning to explore enamel color or looking to deepen and expand your personal color direction.

The Freedom That Comes From Color Fluency

​One of the most powerful changes students experience is a feeling of freedom.

​When you understand how enamel color works, you no longer feel pressure to choose the “right” color.

Instead, you begin trusting that you can:
​
• adjust colors
• layer colors differently
• combine marks and color relationships
• change direction when something surprises you
​
Color becomes something you can work with, rather than something you have to get right the first time.
Instead of worrying about making the correct decision, you begin discovering what happens when you explore a question.
And this is where enamel color starts to become exciting again.

What You Will Leave With

By the end of the workshop you will leave with:
​
• a deeper understanding of how enamel color works
• experience building and exploring enamel color layers
• a growing vocabulary of enamel color marks and design elements
• a method for turning curiosity into small enamel studies
• a clearer sense of your own color preferences

Most importantly, you will leave with the confidence that you can return to your studio and continue exploring enamel color on your own.
​
Even when you feel uncertain about where the work may lead next.

Because you will have something many artists are never taught:
a process for discovering what to do next.

 Introduction to Cloisonne´

Here is what you will learn
​

What is Enamel Color...
Fluency,​ Confidence, and Voice?

I emphasizes Process over Product.
Learning to think and solve problems is more important than copying a project.

Color Fluency
​Students become familiar with basic skills and techniques.
Break down the techniques into steps;
Break down the steps into skills.
​Learn the skills and practice them to build "muscle-memory".

Color Confidence
Learn how "Principles & Variables" affect your results.
A Principle describes a change that is based on a "Law of Nature". For instance, the principle of Thermal Expansion/Contraction describes how the metal and enamel expands when heated and contracts when it cools, how this affects whether your enamel "cracks", and what you can do solve "cracking" problems.
​
Color​ Voice
​

What are Cloisonne´ Foundation Skills?

Instead of learning how to make a "project", students learn skills at the most basic level so that they can practice them without being afraid of making mistakes and "ruining" their results.
​ I like to think of these skills as my PAFF Skills: Prepare, Apply, Fire, and Finish

When I am enameling, I am always using one of these skills...

Prepare: my metal, enamel, wires, foil

Apply: enamel to metal, enamel to enamel, wires to enamel, foil to enamel, enamel to foil

Fire: enamel to metal, enamel to enamel, wires to enamel, foil to enamel, enamel to foil

Finish: techniques to grind, polish, or fire the enamel surface to complete the enamel

​Our workshops help you understand
Enamel Science
Why Science? When you use heat to bond two materials, there is chemistry and physics involved.
Understanding the WHY helps you figure out the WHAT, WHEN,  and HOW questions.

Are there Principles involved? ​​​

• A PRINCPLE is like a "law of nature". It's what the materials want to do.
• When you know that a Principle is involved, you adapt your process to take it into account.
• You succeed when you work with the Principle, not against it. Knowing the Principles helps you solve your problems.
• Example: Transparent layer thickness: the thicker the layer, the less transparent it is

 Know the Principles and Control the Variables.
To understand and apply enamel science, we ask two questions ​...

What are the Variables involved?

• A VARIABLE is anything that you can change that will give you a different result.
• Applying enamel science is learning to ask and answer the question "What does it depend on"? Which variables are affecting your results?
• Time & Temperature are both "firing variables. When you change one, you need to change the other.
• Variables include types of metal, type of enamel, thickness, of enamel, etc.