practicing scroll drawing

Hi - it's me again with a beginner's question. In the book " The Art Of Engraving " by James Meek, he has photo illustrations of scroll drawing practices on the first few pages. Although he states the guiding squares you draw need not be perfect, his scrolls appear as one continuous pencil line - leading to my question - is a brushing pencil stroke ill advised?

My own opinion is that most of us use the brushing stroke as we develop a scroll patern. Myself, I have a small light table. I put the tracing of the part which is to recieve the design, cover this with a piece of tracing paper. I use the brush stroke to develop my patern-Next I place a new tracing paper over the first and trace (the parts I like at least). the next step is to remove the first sketch, realign the second and continue doing this until I am satisfied. When I have finshed the design, without shading I add another sheet of tracing paper and shade on it. The same for background often I dont even retrace the patern just try to get shading I like looking through the tracing paper at the pattern below-when I am satified I transfer the main patern without shading to the metal itself. I use the shaded tracing as reference to shade but to not transfer to the metal. I think a good number of the engravers use a simalar procedure-some use the computer transfer techniques others draw right on the metal (how I do it).

After you are comforable with single scroll drawing I suggest that you create outlines of shapes to creat patterns for. If gun or knife is your intention then use shapes you will find on these-if jewelry or bits and spurs are your interest then us shapes approriate for these-remember to sketch all the time-it will come-Fred

I recommend that you draw scrolls as a series of dots. It is much easier to make a concentric scroll, and its easier to make corrections with when actually cutting them on stee

do as you need at first. go back and refine as needed. it helps, maybe to draw scroll very large at first to become familiar with their structure. when you get a good one, use it for study and reduce it in size for cutting practice. if you notice on the forum, some of the finest engravers start with very crude sketches and simply re-do the drawings till they become a reality. good drawing is the basis of all quality engraving.

After many years of drawing scroll backbones by sketching or brushing strokes I took Scott's advice and started with a series of dots. I don't know why it works better but it does. I can dot in a scroll and get it almost perfect on the first shot and if it isn't I can easily adjust it.

CRB

scott and roger- this seems quite freakish to me. but if you 2 do it, i certainly believe it must have merit. i shall give this a try. tyvm, gents !

Dots?????????? - Aha!!!!!!!!!!! - Connect the dots!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Great!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Thanks - Looks better already and much easier.