Hints and tips:
...Like Paul Scott, she has abstracted motifs from Spode Works copper engravings, splicing the hand-cut enamel transfers with her own imagery across a wall installation of seven plates at Messums....
...A decorative motif known as wrigglework, which is drawn freehand using a zigzag tool, is also a covetable style....
...“The techniques we have adopted use manual burins: ancient goldsmithing tools composed of a particularly shaped tip,” says its creative director Andrea Buccellati....
...Yet figures could easily be “cut and pasted” from separate photographs into a final engraving or reorganised to suit the artist’s eye....
...Glypticians, who patiently apply themselves to learning new skills, who adapt their tools or create new ones, and work around a stone’s unique features, can turn any gemstone into a unique piece of art....
...The gossamer “The Negative of Words” consists of tiny silver curlicues, remnants from a silversmith’s engraving of letters....
...The “i Vision Circular” even replaces the colourful BMW logo with an engraving to cut the use of plastic....
...More often than not he also crafts the tools to make the parts....
...The hand-forged Damascus Hori Hori is no ordinary garden tool....
...Sinuous, ethereal, dynamic, they are like John James Audubon engravings extrapolated into 3D....
...Many of his pieces, however, are made to bespoke order using the ancient technique of “seal engraving”....
...“You can see that in the wood engravings he did at the time.” In a Symbolist style, they are filled with dark, gloomy houses and scurrying black figures....
...After drying the bowl, he begins to strike, armed with a small Japanese tool. With each hit, the copper glimmers and the froth of a wave appears....
...Finally, the engraving. They used to employ a laborious process to stamp serial numbers on blades but now “they don’t mean much when you’re into the thousands”, says Blumenthal....
...Botanical etchings followed, including John Miller’s 1771 coloured engraving showing the flowers, leaves and whole plant in detail....
...Antonio Pollaiuolo’s engraving “Battle of the Nudes”, depicting wiry, belligerent antique nudes as barbaric animals, not classical heroes, was a bestselling print across 1470s Europe....
...Mr Brittain recalls old-fashioned sweet jars being filled with tiny coils of metal, a byproduct of engraving cufflinks....
...“But in this case, it’s a tool of his trade.” Mould’s head of research, Lawrence Hendra, joins us. It was Hendra who identified the artisan as Ralph Symons, an architect-mason from Cambridge....
...He was there for nine years and learnt how to make tools and things like snow shoes out of whaleskin....
...He is surrounded by hammering and firing tools, a forge for heating metals and a bath, called a pickle tank, used for cleaning metals before soldering them....
...At Cartier’s mansion a few blocks south, jewellers mount and set diamonds into engagement rings and carry out repairs and engraving....
...It opens, though, with engravings made when the artist was barely in his twenties....
...Cécile Massart, a former professor of engravings at the Ixelles Academy in Brussels, is one of the pioneers in this field....
...She combines skills such as chasing (defining or refining a surface design by hammering the metal with tools), engraving and part-gilding a piece — where silver and gold are blended to create decorative...
...They particularly value the Liège tradition achieved by “chasing” – standing at a bench for long hours with a hammer and cutting tools, clutching a magnifying glass and an aching back....
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