Little while ago I did one small portrait for practice, now I’m halfway through with the whole image. The progress is quite slow on this, because I’m still learning the technique. So far it looks quite alright, but the hardest parts are not yet done – face and bulk of the body. Wings will not be too difficult, because nobody really knows how they should look like, it’s all fantasy there . Face is different story, even if you don’t know anything about art or composition, you can spot immediately when face doesn’t look right. Currently only the main outlines of face are done, eyes and nose are in right places, but mouth is little bit off. Need to fix that.

Bulino Angel (Artwork by Armando Huerta)

When this practice works out, then I will engrave that same image on silver Zippo and can send it out to a customer.

I’m really happy about customers who push me beyond my comfort zone, and are willing pay for these experiments. This is that kind of project – I’ve never done any bulino work before and starting with a human is quite a challenge.

When I started engraving I made one ‘record’ – engraving 10 lines in one mm. I was quite happy about it. But now time has moved on and I thought I need to push this a little.

The results are:

• 29 lines per mm
• ~200 dots per square mm (with little spare room)

How small can you engrave?

As you can see, normal shading lines look darn huge here, actually to naked eye they create a nice smooth white-grey-black effect. Looks like normal shading for me is about 5-8 lines per mm. These dotted squares are with 1mm sides and the whole ‘channel’ is also 1mm wide.  Very light grey dotted area has maybe 70-80 dots, so there’s enough room to create nice in-between tones. Just need to find the right balance.

This is extreme close up and you are actually never supposed to see any engravings magnified that much.