Sketch a Day: Day 2

Ok, I’m a little embarrased about this sketch, but deal is a deal and here it is.

I tried and tried, but it still came out as a freak of nature. Guy looks like is paper thin :)

Sketch a Day: Day 1

I came up with a weird idea – make one sketch every day for next 30 days. Sketches will be studies of human figure and animals. Mostly human figure. I will post all my tries here, so in the next 30 days I will post at least one post per day.

Main goal is of course to learn to draw, so when someone wants an engraving about anything besides floral scrollwork I can do it. If you can’t draw it, you can’t engrave it.

Many human figure studies will be made from Pose Maniacs site. This site has about 19000 different poses for the exact purpose of learning human figure. Visible musculature and no hair. Perfect.

Here’s today’s sketch.

I hope that after 30 days there’s some improvement…

Learning drawing

Whenever you ask any engraver what is the most important thing in engraving, or in learning to engrave, they’ll say right away “Drawing and design!”. Good design executed badly looks better than bad design executed perfectly. And “If you can’t draw it, you can’t engrave it”.

So my goal for year 2009 is to learn drawing, design and related art stuff as much as possible. I went to portrait drawing course and started to study design in university. This will be an interesting and very busy year.

Here are my first feeble attempts in drawing ’stuff’. I have had very little practice and it shows. Mainly I post for the record – would be nice to come back in a year or two and see how much I’ve progressed.

This is my model for learning human figure.

And here’s my first go at it.

And here is yours truly.

As you can see, I still need ’some’ practice :). But at least learning is fun when you can see the results.

Engraved guitar pickup cover

When the word goes around, all kinds of strange things are wanted to be engraved. Knives, spoons, Zippos are now quite regular. And them comes someone who asks whether I could engrave something I’ve never heard about before.

This time it was electric guitar pickup cover. OK, I knew what electric guitar was, begin Queen fan myself, but I had really no idea what that cover was and what it’s used for. A change to learn and widen horizons. Now I know where it goes and additionally also how electric guitars actually work.

Anyway, here’s the engraving I came up with.

Close-up of the engraving.

This engraving posed quite a challenge. As the detail was nickel plated, it meant “no mistakes allowed”, because when I’d slip during engraving, there’s no way to fix the mirror finish. With non-plated metal, there’s always a chance to sand or burnish down the mistake, but that’s not possible on plated detail.

I think it came out OK.

Engraved memory sticks

Here are two quick engravings on memory sticks. The engraving style is called ‘piddling’, or if I want to sound expensive, then ‘double bevel’ engraving.

As these memory sticks are made from extremely soft metal, this is the only style that can be done decently on them. Can’t do any fine lines/detail on them. I drew the design on as I started to engrave, so not much preparing was needed.

2 quick engraving jobs

Here are two quick engravings I had to do. These little projects are really good for both design and technique practice. Relatively small and fast projects.

Long knife

Little while ago we finished our last order. Brass bolsters, blade steel is D2. First time we used stabilized wood for handle and it came out really nice.

Learning English scroll

There’s a scroll style called English scroll. Probably the earliest type of scrolls of them all. I wanted to learn it the other day, but it’s a real trial and error when you don’t know how to make the cuts or what are the principal rules of it.

But here are my tries.The first one has some kind of similarity to English scroll, but not really.

The second one is already more like it, but still not quite there yet.

Second one with ruler – in real life it’s actually quite small.

Memory stick winner

The memory stick winner is known now. I used rand function from ruby shell to determine the winner and my darling wife was looking over me so I couldn’t cheat:

[21:54:47] comp:~ irb
>> rand(24) + 1
=> 8

The winner is commenter number 8, who is Uthay. I will contact you and send out the memory stick as soon as I get your address.

Thank you all for participating! Watch this space to see the next competition (might be a good idea to subscribe to feed or email updates).

Next time I’m back with more delicious prize.

Memory stick giveaway

UPDATE: giveaway is now over. Thanks for participating.

Did that get your attention? Good, because now is the chance to get free hand engraved 2GB USB memory stick. To participate simply leave a comment to this post stating “Me wants it” or anything with your email so I can contact the winner.

On 21st of Nov 2008 I will pick a random commenter and send the memory stick to him/her. Commenting once is enough, thank you.

This is what you are getting (measures 2.6×1.5cm).

If you made this far into the post I must say that this stick was a testpiece to see how good it is to engrave one. Conclusion – not that good. The metal is extremely soft and it’s very hard to do fine engraving. Also, I use acetone for design transfer and this melts the plastic. You can see from photos the problematic places.

But hey, it’s free and loaded with few of my knifemaking and engraving videos.

Next victim is either iPod Shuffle or spoon… Hmm.