July 27 work in progress

I hope the pink t-shirt doesn't throw you too badly for a loop. It was just that I happened to have the engraving under the scope when I was ready to take pics, rather than the black background you usually see!

Yes, I'm trying my hand (uh, literally) at engraving again. I'm a tad jealous that a bunch of my friends are soon going to be in Kansas for the two-week Grand Master engraving class learning Italian bulino engraving, so it's inspiring me to try it again. I definitely don't have the comfort level with this that I do with scrim! This is on steel. Pencil lead is shown for scale. The pic is taken through the microscope, so you're seeing what I see when I work.

I've seen worse

I sure as heck won't be posting this on the forums or showing you any closeups, but this is my first line engraving. No dots. (Well, some stippling, but that's different). By the time I got to the feathers I decided to forego details, there's only so much time I wanted to spend on this. But I learned a whole heck of a lot about engraving in the process, made a gazillion mistakes, and know (at least in theory) how not to repeat a few of them.

March 3 work in progress

Oh yeah, now we're gettin' somewhere! :-)


In other news, it hailed this afternoon. Earlier in the day it was sunny and pleasant, and then it turned super cold and little balls of ice fell from the sky. I am overwhelmed by the urge to say "What the hail!"

Here's a teaser closeup of the engraving practice that I'm doing. This part is about 3/8 of an inch tall. What might surprise you is the fact that these would not be considered particularly fine small cuts. That's actually deliberate. I set out to work kinda "big" just to get a better feel for handling gravers. Of course, when it comes to engraving, even "big" is pretty small ;-)