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.
Imho however your talent is obvious. And you can be sure that if you continue practicing like this your rapid growth is absolutely imminent.
Thank you, dear 🙂
At least, you possess an enormous amount of natural talent. And that your idea of exploring them, can only add to your success.
There’s no doubt in my mind that you will progress very quickly.
What an awesome blog! I wish you’d post more often, but I understand how much effort that takes. I’m taking the same path (Programmer to Blacksmith, maybe onto Bladesmith), and I was very pleased to find your blog.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks! Yes, well, if there would be more interesting stuff, I’d post it :).
And the ‘interesting stuff’ is always tied to the time I can spend on it.
But the journey is interesting, isn’t it? When I started this blog I named it ‘ … to blacksmith’, but this goal changes always. Currently I’m more focused on engraving and not even mainly knife engraving, but different things I could do in engraving – dies for coins, printmaking etc. So I think this is never ending journey.