I just arrived back from US, where I spent 3 weeks learning engraving, visiting Blade Show and Engrave-In. Time well spent. Met a lot of new people, learned bunch of new stuff and got lots of inspiration to move on with my engraving.

I was learning more advanced engraving techniques from Scott Pilkington. We covered metal inlays, both wire and sheet and sculpting. My final job was a sculpted keyfob with letter “H” on it. This piece took me about 4 days to complete. Its height is about 5cm.

The other side is still not finished, but it has a little pink gold inlay on it. When I finish it, you’ll see it too.

The annual Engrave-In is held at Scott’s place and it is basically an engravers get together. This year we had about 100 people present, even from Japan. We had presentations from Amayak Stepanyan, Ron Landis, Roger Bleile, Ray Cover, Scott Pilkington and a round table discussion with same guys plus Simon Lytton. Google for these people, you will see magnificent engravings. Steve Lindsay was also present there and I got to play a little with his prototype engraving vises. Man, these are smooth and sweet. Unfortunately can’t afford it by any means.

The day after Engrave-In Amayak showed me his sculpting technique and then it was time to go home again. I really hope I can go back next year.

Different things have taken up my time lately, so not much has been going on related to engraving and knife making. But the other day I engraved a spoon. It was again sort of experiment – I did not prepare the design beforehand, but made it up as I started the engraving.

Also, this was the first spoon I found, or actually any other kitchenware, that wasn’t made of terribly hard metal and was easily engrave-able.

In 2008 I participated in engravers get together called Engrave-In at Scott Pilkington’s place. This is annual even held after Blade Show.

Joe Rundell made a workshop about gunstock carving and gold overlay, Paul Hamler showed how lost wax casting is done and Jim Hall demoed fast draw shooting, which was very cool indeed.

Here’s a little video of what happened there. To watch in high-res just click on the video.

Here are the next and final sketches. Some better, some worse, some outright ugly. But the good news is that it can only get better!

Here’s last week’s batch of sketches. Some are better, some worse. Final conclusion is, that I should just practice more.

Don’t you just love it when you get something done? Past few weeks I’ve been working on a Zippo engraving for a customer. My first idea was to make it rather simple design, but that sort of didn’t work out. This is first of the ‘replicated pattern’ type of engraving I’ve done, at least on this level. One I made a mirrored design engraving, but I think this one is an improvement over the old one.

Anyways, that engraving is now completed. Here are few photos of engraving in progress.

Zippo engraving in progress, half of the contours done.

In this stage the lower right corner is completely finished (I just wanted to see how the final result will look like, impatient as I am), all the shading is done and some of the background is removed (the more shiny spots).

Zippo engraving half finished.

And here it is, completely finished.

Completed Zippo engraving.

Design took about 8 hours (I’m still very slow at it) and engraving 13 hours.

So, what do y’all think about it?

You wouldn’t want to run into one of these in the night.

That fella is sort of recognisable, isn’t he? But I think I will start posting after every other day or so, not to bore you to death with my crappy drawings.

But here is also a teaser of soon to be finished Zippo engraving.

Lower right corner is already inked, so that’s how the final result will look like.

Ok, panthers usually aren’t that ugly, but it’s a start, right? Actually I start to like this drawing/sketching thing more and more. I just have to practice to get anything that might resemble a good result.

A magnificent bird in a not so magnificent drawing.

Today’s sketch gave me also fits. Just couldn’t get it right.

Maybe some of you recognize from which photo this model is taken from? There were 4 of them… Anyways, I think I will take a little break from full figure drawing and try out something else. Maybe just hands. These don’t come easily either (what does?).

But on another note. One Zippo engraving is starting to take a shape. Today I managed to start shading. Here’s a bit of it.