Experimenting with Etching and Enamel

For the past couple of days, I have been re-interested in my etching work and I decided to see what would happen if I combine my etching with enamel to add a little bit of colour. I looked back at some designs that I printed on some blue etch paper a few months ago and I decided to use the little Ixia Flower designs (I printed a whole lot of designs on one paper as it costs about R 80-00 a sheet and I didn't want to waste any bit of it)
After transferring the etch design onto the clean metal, I noticed that the little pieces of film that I pulled off had an inverted design on a transparent background so I decided to mount them on gold paper in little windows (just for fun)

Etching filmon copper sheets and the film that was removed

Mounted film papers

I left the copper in the etching solution checking every few hours. I noticed that the etching solution was slow in the early morning and in the afternoon it was etching very rapidly, in fact too rapidly as it etched too deep ( I'm assuming it is due to the rise in temperature ) and I lost some detail after removing it from the solution but this is okay because it's a test piece. I then wet packed the etched spaces of the copper plate with enamel powder to see how it would come out:

Combination of Enamel and Etching

I noticed that in some areas the enamel cracked due to the plate being quite thin and I realized that I dont have to etch so deep in future but I also felt that it was very difficult fitting the enamel in all the tiny places thus I think that it would be better if I use another colouring technique such as acrylic or cold enamel paint to get colour in all those nooks and crannies.