The Greatest Generation project

At the 2012 Colt Collectors Association show, last month, the "Greatest Generation" Colt 1911 won the Howard Dove award, and also Best Single Weapon, 1946-Present.  The latter is not an award that is given every year, but rather is given as the judges see fit.  It has been getting some huge attention and is going to get some huge publicity.  The professional photos have not yet been publicly released, though I have been given permission to share one (and only one!) of them here.  It wasn't easy to pick one, of course I want you to see everything, but this has everything.  The gun, the knife, the gorgeous case, the awards, and the art that I created for the top slide.  I am so proud and honored to be a part of this!

The project will be shown at the Firearms Engravers Guild of America show in Reno in January of 2013.  I may have permission to leak another photo or two before then, but I think it's pretty much staying under wraps until the big public release!

Michael Dubber, Evansville, Indiana - Master Engraver

Katherine Plumer, Oak Run, California -  Scrimshander

Larry Downing, Bremen, Kentucky – Custom Made Knife

Doug Turnbull, Bloomfield, New York - Final Finish

Les Yoder, Coopersville, Michigan - Custom Case

"The Greatest Generation" Bowie knife

Hellooo, sorry for not blogging more... I'm back and forth between two computers, with no photo/website software on one and tempermental old software on the other, so blogging is kind of a giant pain in the you know what right now. I need to get all transferred over so I can resume normality here on the internet.

But, nevertheless, I finished second part of the "The Greatest Generation" project, the Bowie knife, a few days ago. This is has been an incredible project, and I SO honored to have been a part of it. So here's a big huge heartfelt THANK YOU to Dennis and to Mike!!!

I think I talked about this earlier, but I'll talk about it again... the theme of this piece. Originally there were some ideas kicked around that just weren't feasible for various reasons, so I started on the grips for the 1911 first (with Patton and MacArthur) while we all thought more about what to do with the knife. And I was reading one of my art magazines one day and found an article about a photographer of horses, and what really stuck in my mind was the dramatic clouds in the photos. And that got me thinking about the knife, and the long horizontal space... and airplanes! Iconic WWII airplanes! That idea was well received, and we were off and running. My client selected the types of planes (a F4U Corsair to represent the Pacific Theater, and a P-38 Lightning and two B-17s to represent the European Theater), the types of ships shown on the Pacific side (Essex, Gridley, Baltimore), and the general theme of each side, and I designed the layout. But I kept thinking back to the horse photos and the clouds, and I knew I wanted the background and the scenery to be just as important as the planes.

I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but I think my biggest challenge here was trying to give these inanimate objects a sense of life. It's not like depicting a person's face, or an animal. I feel that I accomplished that goal. :-)

I am thrilled, THRILLED, with how this all turned out, I wouldn't change a thing on any of it. I can't wait to see it all finished, all the parts together. I know that Mike is still working on engraving the pistol, but the whole set will be shown at the Colt Collectors Association show this fall, and at the Firearms Engravers Guild of America show next January.

Now, I gotta tell you I'm not set up AT ALL for photographing metal. I took about 987498745 pictures and they all sucked, so I got fed up and scanned the darn thing. Unfortunately this doesn't do justice to the beautiful blade or to the engraving, so I've put in some of the closeup shots as well. I'm sure this will be professionally photographed at some point when the whole project is completed.

Knife made by Larry Downing
Engraved by Michael Dubber
Scrimshaw by me, obviously ;-)
Total length of knife: 11 inches
Length of ivory handle: 3-5/8 inches (at the longest point)

If you click on the pics you can see them bigger!













This should give you a sense of size:

March somethingorother work in progress

This was from a few days ago. This is the last WIP pic that you will see. It's soooo close to done right now (right now being much farther along than what you see here). :-)

March 6 work in progress

The end is in sight! I say that not out of relief, but just excitement. :-)

I spent some time last night figuring out what to do with the background, and looking at lots of photographs of skies and clouds and landscapes. I've got it all planned out now, so in about a gazillion more dots I'll be done. (That's how I should start measuring time, dots, as in "sure, I'd love to go out to dinner, just give me 4500 dots and I'll be ready, okay?")

March 1 work in progress

This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but I'm having software problems up the wazoo. I recently bought a brand new shiny iMac (yes I'm very proud of that) but I have not moved all my stuff from this ancient iMac over there yet, and the ancient iMac (on which I have photo editing software and other magical things, and on which I am currently writing this) is having issues. Things might get all complicated here for a while in my world as I attempt to switch over in the next few weeks. Oh how I hate computer problems!

Anyway...

No scrimshaw today, I tweaked my wrist pretty bad somehow yesterday and it said I needed to work on some other stuff today.

February 25 work in progress

Okay, the planes are done! (unless I need to tweak something... always a possibility). I more or less know what I'm doing with the background. At least, I have the ground part figured out. I don't know yet what I will do with the sky, kinda depends how everything else looks. :-)

February 23 work in progress

February 20 work in progress

February 15 work in progress

February 8 work in progress

Oh boy, I've been so caught up in shooting more video footage that I nearly forgot to take some photographs!

I've started on the other side of the knife. I know that I haven't showed you the finished Corsair image. I will eventually. ;-)

But tonight I give you this really crappy, blurry, poorly-lit photo showing a partially completed border. Exciting, right?


There's a whole lot more going on than what you can actually see. The entire design is lightly dotted on and scribed into the surface. Scribing is basically lightly scratching. It won't hold ink, but it shows me where I need to make the marks.


Feel free to send winning lottery tickets, large sums of cash, and Prince Charming in my direction. Tomorrow's my birthday. ;-)

scrimshaw video!

FINALLY! I've been trying to upload this thing for days! It was too big and wouldn't upload properly, so I had to make it a bit shorter than the original version...

Enjoy! ;-)

February 2 work in progress

This is the first "layer" of dots making up the cloud formations. I will be working back into it and deepening the shadows and really giving it some "punch."


And guess who just figured out how to shoot a video!!! Me! Well, I knew how to shoot video, but I just figured out HOW to arrange the camera so as to record what I am doing. I'm tinkering with it right now. [significant time passes, la la ha]. Well boogers, this is taking too long. I'll fiddle with it more tomorrow. It's bed time!

January 12 work in progress

Ooookay, let's see if I can get back on track with blogging and scrimshawing and everything else.

When I was a kid I had a toy airplane that I recall being quite fond of. It was dark blue shiny metal on top, light blue plastic underneath, had a black and white checkerboard pattern around the nose, and had funny bent wings. Little did I know that my cherished toy was a model of an F4U Corsair. I know that now, and there's a little bit of glee in depicting "my" special airplane (though this one doesn't have the checkerboard pattern).





There is quite a bit of work yet to go on this side. The ocean will be darker and choppy, and the sky will be full of clouds.

December 14 work in progress

Okay, oh my goodness, December is a really busy month. No, I'm not getting much scrimshaw done lately, I'm afraid I just have 4350934850983 other things going on at the moment. But there is at least a little progress. Actually I have more done than what's pictured here tonight, but it's at an ugly stopping point (no worries, I just mean one wing is half-shaded), and besides the camera is in the other room AND it's after midnight and all I can think about is flannel sheets and the cat that's already curled up on my bed.

Anyway..

If you're one of my readers who visits the studio in person sometimes, you'd maybe notice I have the desk set up a little different than usual. Because the knife is so very large, I didn't want to use my vise for it, but feel MUCH safer keeping it on the tabletop. So I've pulled the table forward up over the top of the vise stand. Works pretty well that way! And I'm remembering how much I like keeping my elbows on the table when I work. Maybe this will become my default setup again, I'll have to think about that. Working on a piece of this size can get pretty awkward, and that's part of the reason I keep it thoroughly padded and taped, so as not to skewer body parts that I would rather not have skewered.... I was going to post a photo to illustrate this, but it seemed like a pretty gratuitous boob photo (I'm sure at least one of you would have enjoyed that though) so you'll have to use your imagination....


So yeah, some progress! As you can now see, this side features the F4U Corsair. There will be a very full background. What will it be? Well, just wait and see!



And I would just like to say that putting the border on the curved upper and lower edge of this knife was really hard. I'm feeling very happy to working on a mostly-flat surface though, unlike the pistol grips which required me to constantly refocus the scope every time I moved them!

the next scrimshaw project

Okay, this is the beginnings of part two of the Greatest Generation project, a very large knife. Here's a pic I posted months ago before starting anything:


And here it is all wrapped and taped and padded so I can work on it:


The WWII theme will continue here, of course. This is one that has undergone a lot of changes. My client's original suggestions did not turn out to be feasible options for this piece, so there was a lot of brainstorming to come up with other ideas. My mind was actually sparked while perusing an article in one of my art magazines about a photographer of horses. The photos had these dark moody clouds in the background that really caught my attention, and that got me thinking about the sky, which got me thinking about airplanes.... AIRPLANES! Yeah! Those can be compositionally arranged to fit a long narrow space! That idea went over well and we were off and running. So the knife will feature a few of the iconic airplanes from WWII, one side representing the European theatre and the other side representing the Pacfic theater (corresponding to the Patton and MacArthur images on the pistol grips).


Now, I should have gotten a lot more done in the last few days, but guess who totally mashed her right thumb into the wall a few days ago while, um... I hate to even admit this... hunting rats... Yeah, that would be me. It's finally feeling better today (and what a lovely shade of purplish blue!) but it had all the strength of a bag of jell-o there for a little bit. I'm bad for thumbs.

"The Greatest Generation" Colt 1911 Grips

Woo hoo, the grips are done! I am really, really, really thrilled by how these turned out. This is a tremendous project to be involved in (and a tremendously large project!). I'm all smiles. :-)

Here they are!


You want closeups? You got it!



What, not close enough? Okay.



Seriously, more detail? Okay... fine, but that's all you get.



Next up, the knife! With airplanes! Thankfully the time pressure is off, nobody involved was going to be ready for a Dec 1 deadline. *WHEW*

November 15 work in progress

Oooooohhhh my goodness this takes a long time. It is my own fault that I fell behind, so I'm working very hard to catch up. 12 hour days at the microscope until this is done. I have even less of a life than usual right now. ;-) But these grips are only the first part, there is still a very large knife... There is serious incentive to be done by the end of the month and I'm trying!! I really don't know if I can pull that off though. Realistically, probably not, but I'll still try. You can't rush scrimshaw, and there's no way I would cut corners or sacrifice quality. Most important thing here is to make the absolute BEST work I can do, whatever it takes. I have a great client and he deserves the best scrimshaw I can possibly create. :-)

The pistol grips are getting darn close to being done. I'm working on the background maps now, shading the ocean. The Europe side is not finished. Then I still need to do the lettering (the names of the generals) and probably tweak a few shadows here and there. I really wanted to finish the oceans tonight but I am going to go nuts if I don't stop for the day. :-)

November 12 work in progress

If you are not familiar with the size of a Colt 1911 grip, here's my hand for scale. And yes, those are my pajamas. ;-) And no, these are not finished.

November 10 work in progress

Not the prettiest stopping point tonight, but my wrist says "time to stop!!!" and one does not ignore one's wrist when it says such things (besides, it's after midnight). I'm going to say this side is more difficult, for two reasons. The first is that his face is mostly in shadow from the brim of the hat. So this will all look better and make more sense when I finish. The side of his face (that would be his left cheek) will be a whole lot darker than what you see now. As I said, wrist said go to bed, I obey... The second thing is that this piece of ivory has a lot of variation on it, and the other side didn't. So the real dark looking ivory, sort of a figure-8 shape next to his mouth, that's REALLY soft. The dots end up bigger, so with the same dot-coverage it'll look even darker when inked. The wide light-colored swath of ivory that runs down his cheek is very hard, so the dots look smaller. I have to compensate for this, giving some area less or more dots even when it seems contrary to what I ought to be doing.

Okay, time to go dream about poking dots...