The Enamel
Color Confidence
Workshop


​Trust your color choices because you have practiced exploring Enamel Color.

Turn your Enamel Skills into your Enamel Voice
​

Turn Skill Into Confidence

​This workshop helps you turn your enamel color skills into enamel color confidence.
Instead of thinking about enamel color as something you either “get right” or struggle with, we begin to think about it as a skill and a language you can practice.
Fluency becomes the goal. Practice becomes the method.
In this workshop, you will learn how enamel, metal, and heat work together to create color.
You will explore enamel marks, layers, and relationships.
And you will practice making color decisions in a way that helps enamel color feel more familiar, flexible, and personal over time.
This is how confidence begins to grow.

Learn How to Practice
​ to Build Enamel Color Confidence

Practicing well is a skill — and this workshop helps you learn how.​

Most enamel workshops teach techniques for making finished pieces.

This workshop focuses on something different:
Understanding how enamel color works and exploring what you can do with enamel color.

You practice making color, observing what happens when it's heated, and exploring how different choices affect the result.
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Over time, color decisions begin to feel clear and natural, because they come from experience rather than guesswork.
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Along the way, you also learn how to practice and play with enamel color so you can keep exploring long after the workshop ends.

How to improve a skill

Athletes, musicians, and dancers practice so their skills become stronger, more natural, and easier to trust.

They often begin by working on one small part at a time.
They repeat it with intention, breaking difficult skills into smaller parts they can actually practice.

Then, as the skill improves, they begin using it in more challenging situations or combining it with other skills.
Both kinds of practice make the skill stronger.

Over time, the skill becomes easier to access without so much overthinking, anxiety, or doubt.
That is one of the ways practice builds confidence.

Turning a skill into muscle memory helps because it frees you to do more than just remember the steps.

• Athlete: shooting free throws over and over
• Musician: practicing a scale or difficult passage repeatedly
• Dancer: repeating the same turn, leap, or short sequence many times

They may not use these exact exercises in performance, but practicing them builds the muscle memory that supports performance.

What we are doing here is practicing making enamel color decisions to support more freedom, fluency, and personal expression in future work.​

The Secret to Color Confidence
​People often ask how I became “good with color.”
​The answer is surprisingly simple:

I made lots of bad color decisions.
I made a lot of pieces I didn’t like.
​And I learned from each one.
​
Each time, I paid attention to what I liked and what I didn’t like.
Then I tried to do more of what I liked and less of what I didn’t like.

Over time something important happened.
Choosing colors and color combinations stopped feeling stressful
and started feeling simple and natural.

This workshop helps you build that same kind of experience with enamel color.
Through small studies and guided experiments, you explore color in many different ways — until your own color decisions begin to feel clear and confident.
And here is one more secret:
When I didn’t like the colors I made,
I trusted that I could change something until I did.

Make MORE Color Decisions, not GOOD ones.
(Here is How I Did It)

Build color confidence through repeated choice, not through getting it right.

Ask more color questions, make more color decisions, and then do one small thing to learn from your choices.
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Not the Right Questions. Your Questions, based on your curiosity. Not mine.

• Students will begin making and collecting marks using mixed media. It's quick and worry-free.
• Then we move on to making enamel marks and translating mixed media marks into enamel marks.
• Finally, we combine our enamel marks and layers to let our personal preferences begin to emerge.

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This workshop is not about getting color RIGHT.
​ It is about becoming more COMFORTABLE and fluent with the process of noticing, choosing, testing, changing, and discovering color through direct experience.

Smaller color questions lead to smaller color decisions.
Practice following your curiosity.

"When Enamel Color Decisions Feel Overwhelming
"What do I do when the teacher is not there?"

You are making decisions within a layered process where each step can affect the next.
Each color decision sits inside a web of other decisions.
​It not you or your skills; it's the nature of enameling.

First, there are the choices about the color itself.

• Opaque, transparent, or opalescent enamel — or some combination?
• How thick should this layer be?

Then there are the questions about what is already happening in the piece.

• What colors have already been fired into place?
• What is underneath the enamel I’m about to apply?

Then there is the uncertainty of firing.

• What will this color look like after firing?
• Will this firing change anything that has already been fired?

And finally, the piece is still evolving.

• What might go on top of it later?
• Will later firings change this application?
• How will this decision affect the whole piece when it is finished?

Even if you are not consciously asking these questions while you work, each of these variables is still influencing the result.

Is this YOU?
(It's me too.)

aEven after more than 50 years of enameling, these types of questions are still part of my studio experience. They tend to show up most often whenever I’m working on something I really care about.

Over the years, I’ve also noticed that many enamel students experience the same moments when working with color.
​You might recognize some of these:

• I make a sample to see what a color looks like… but then I’m afraid to use it in a piece.
• I find myself choosing colors that have worked for me before.
• I have so many ideas that I end up doing nothing.
• I buy new enamel colors but they sit on the shelf because I don't trust that I will like them and might ruin my piece.
• I worry about making the wrong choice.

These moments are incredibly common when working with enamel color.
The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. 
It's to trust your ability to make a decision and keep moving forward. 
​Not only is making decisions a skill, but so is trusting your decisions.
But how can you learn and practice these skills?
And what might happen if you don't?

​My Story​

​The moment I almost stopped enameling

Years ago I reached a point where I felt completely stuck with my enameling.
My technical skills were good enough to make beautiful pieces. I had taken classes, learned techniques, and understood the materials.
But something was missing.
The excitement I had felt when I first discovered enameling—the color, the layers, the light that had captivated me—had either vanished or was hidden somewhere deep inside me.
I felt bored with what I was making, but I didn’t understand why.​

Instead of taking more classes or trying to force myself to make better finished pieces, I decided to move in a different direction.
That decision changed the course of the next forty years of my work with enamel.

The Turning Point
I started asking different questions

What changed everything was surprisingly simple. I began changing the kinds of questions I asked myself.

Instead of asking:
What should I make?
What will look good?
I began asking questions about my relationship with enamel color:

• What do I actually like?
• What is possible with this material?
• What happens if I try something new?
• What keeps me stuck?

As my questions changed, my approach to enamel changed as well.
I stopped focusing on making finished pieces and started using enamel as a way to explore my questions.

The way I did that was through practice.
I began making small studies—not finished pieces, and not samples I hoped I would like—but simple explorations designed to see what would happen.

Practice became a way of asking questions and discovering what enamel could do.

A simple way to become more comfortable with enamel color 

Practice using enamel color.
What does that mean?

• Notice color more often in the world around you.
• Ask yourself more — and different — color questions.
• Turn those questions into enamel color questions.
• Use those questions to make small enamel color studies.

Then:
Reflect.
Learn something.
Change something.
Repeat the process.
Over time, this kind of practice builds the experience that turns color decisions into something clear, confident, and personal.
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This is what we do in this workshop.
We become comfortable with enamel color by practicing how to make, change, and combine enamel color.
Over time, that practice turns uncertainty into familiarity and confidence.

More Than Techniques or Projects

This workshop is not only about learning techniques or following directions to make a project you will like.
It is about learning a process you can keep using to develop your own enamel color language.
Forever!
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In this workshop, you will not just practice color.
You will practice a way of working with color that helps you keep discovering, testing, changing, and learning over time.
Through repeated color decisions, mark-making, comparison, layering, and small studies, you begin to build the foundation of a more personal enamel color language.
You will leave with more than new samples and ideas.
You will leave with a process you can return to again and again—one that can help your enamel language continue to emerge, grow, and evolve.
Or even tighter:

This Workshop turns Practice into Play

Over five days we explore enamel color through demonstrations, small studies, and shared discoveries — 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.
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Because of this small group format, the workshop can meet each student where they are — whether you are beginning to explore enamel color or looking to deepen and expand your personal color direction.

Workshop Q & A

Do I need to be experienced with enamel to take this workshop?

No. This workshop is designed for anyone who wants to become more comfortable working with enamel color.

​You don’t need to be an expert. What matters most is a willingness to explore color through small studies and experiments.
If you already have experience with enamel, the workshop can help you deepen your understanding of color and develop greater confidence in your color decisions.

Question 1

What will I actually be doing during the workshop?

You will be exploring enamel color through a series of small studies and guided experiments.
These studies help you investigate questions such as:

• What happens when different colors are layered?
• How does the metal beneath the enamel affect color?
• What changes when thickness or firing conditions change?

Along the way you’ll also experiment with creating and combining enamel color elements that can later become part of finished work.

How will this help me improve my color decisions?

Color decisions become easier when they come from experience rather than guessing.
As you make studies and observe the results, you begin to recognize patterns and understand how enamel color behaves.
Over time, those discoveries accumulate. You start trusting your own observations and drawing on that experience when making color choices.
That’s how color skills gradually turn into confidence and fluency.

What if I make studies that I don’t like?

That’s actually an important part of the process.
Much of what artists learn about color comes from noticing what they do and don’t like.
When a result surprises you or doesn’t work the way you expected, it becomes an opportunity to ask questions, make changes, and try something new.
Those discoveries are exactly what help build your understanding of enamel color.