Striving for perfection.....

While of course learning to do things perfectly is the way to go, 99% of the time a job will have a slight "thing" wether a cut or whatever thats not 100%.
Thats handwork for you....
Not to panic and be put off too much, so long as you understand what and how it could/should be as 99.9% of non-pro customers or viewers will not notice.

At the end of the day, the handwork can get away with a slight "cockup" so long as it`s not sticking out like a sore thumb.

Beginners get put off by worrying over slight errors they might make..
Good to point them out, but at the same time, if they are not messing the overall design to the laymans eye then its a fine job and just something to be aware of next time to try to improve....

The reason i brought this up is that i noticed that even on some "top name " gun engraving, ther are scrolls that are not 100% but so what. Overall thase small things go mainly unnoticed.....
http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt257/Gemsetterchris/example.jpg

One is very slightly flat, the one above not quite a neat sweep, but both close, thats what matters.

Just to give abit more encouragement to those wannabes and triers like me ; )

What you have to remember Chris is that it's good to strive for perfection but we're all human. Whilst you may find cutting an anti-clockwise scroll easy, cutting blind off the backhand can be difficult. Often, where there is a lot of scrollwork it's the overall impression that counts. As long as it doesn't happen too often , the occasional, slightly wonky scroll isn't always picked up by the eye.

I had a Kell engraved rifle a few weeks ago, that I had to do some matching up of other parts to. Harry Kell was the man who taught my father to engrave so my having been taught along the same lines, matching the style wasn't too difficult. I noticed though, just how crude (by modern standards) some of the scrollwork was. But he didn't have modern tooling and optics! When I stopped looking at it with a critical, engraver's eye I truly noticed how beautiful and charming it was in it's own right. The scrolls weren't perfect and neither was the 'mirroring' but that didn't matter. It still said "Quality".

Machines, computers and lasers can make everything perfect and regular, a human being working with their hands can't always compete with this perfection but they can still create something of great beauty in it's own right.

I was told when learning some Native American arts that a lot of native artist leave a small imperfection in there work, as in there eye's the only one to do perfect work is the Great Spirit. It's a nice way to look at it when I screw something up:big grin:

Kevin

I was just reading through an engraving book that I just got off of Amazon and I was noticing that a lot of engravings were very crude and rough by today's standards. Some of them might even fall into the "unacceptable" range. It would be easy to dismiss these early works by saying that the technology just wasn't there, but then I turn the page and there are works from W. Churchhill and Ron Smith, both done without power or microscopes. Phil Coggan is at the pentacle of achievement in this field and up until very recently he has been primarily working the same way they worked 100 years ago. I still don't blame the engravers because the technology that makes their work look flat to us today isn't an air powered graver or a microscope, its this internet thingy in your hands right now. We know what really really good engraving looks like now, and so we strive to equal it-it the bar we all try to surpass. In the old days, your bar was the works you saw in your hand. The better engravers were exposed to more artists' works and even sought it out. They had smoke pulls and traded castings to expand on their view of what good engraving is supposed to look like. Sometimes it seems like they couldn't even get a decent photo of engraving until the 50's or so. Thanks for the interweb, Al Gore.(LOL)

Kevin, in the weaving of many native peoples they intentional put in an imperfection; it's not that they 'leave' some imperfection. It's intentional.
Kevin P.

Something I noticed in this thread showing the latest work of Leonardo's wonderous Artesà machine is that the result seems almost too perfect.

Let's see if I can get the first picture to show over in this thread...


Ha!

In any case, this is a nice design. It's beautifully cut, but somehow it strikes me as lacking life.

I could ramble on (actually I did but deleted it) but whatever it is, I don't think I can quite explain it.

Steve, Wm Morris, the famous Victorian designer, wrote an essay on this very topic.
It's been a very long time since I read it; but I think I can paraphrase.
No matter how perfect your work, if it's hand done there will always be 'the touch of the hand' visible in your work.

As wonderful as Leonardo's engraving machine is; it lacks that touch. It's sterile; it has no soul. No offense Leonardo; your machine will have it's place.

Hand work will always have an audience because of that 'touch'. People respond to that even if they can't articulate the difference.
Kevin P.

These are my thoughts---and in no way meant to be inflammatory. (Everybody has their own opinion,right?)

Chris, personally,I don't strive for perfection as much as I strive for expression through Composition/Originality/Grace/Balance/Harmony,yada,yada,yada.

To me "nailing it" ,engraving wise, isn't always the way to go. There's a huge difference between doing a poor composition perfectly and doing a perfect composition poorly. Both look horrible for their own reasons.

I might be a Master Engraver, but I'm far from being a Master Artist.
As a matter of fact, designing and layout are virtual "killers" for me.
Believe me when it comes to designing, there are some days I wish all I had to do was pump gasoline (petrol).

When most of us see a real "Beauty", (gun,knife,whatever) we really see the end result from a vision,deliberate design, careful layout and then proper execution. Some folks are better at this than others.

I can't say I've ever strived for perfection. I really do try to make the finished design look exactly as I envisioned it. It all looks perfect in my mind.
Getting it to that stage is a real challenge, in human terms.