A magnificent bird in a not so magnificent drawing.

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…

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.

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.

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.