Artist/Prodution engraving

[Marcus Hunt]

#30 Yesterday, 08:34 PM
Ray Cover Jr
Registered User Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 745

Andy,

Rick is right. 80 hours is not too much. There is a fallacy of thought that says the more experienced and better you get the faster you get.

To a certain point that holds true for beginners. Then you hit a plateau where you cannot go any faster and hold the same high standards of quality. At that point it seems most folks have to slow down just a bit to get any better as far as quality goes.

To add to that, as you add more detail (and the smaller the scale) you slow down even more to keep and improve quality.

What I just said applies even to production engravers to a point. Although they are usually willing to let a few points of quality go in trade for speed.

I know you well enough to know that you are not interested in being a production engraver. You like many of the rest of us are here to create art. If that takes 80 hours it takes 80 hours.

Ray



Hi guys, I've started a new thread following on from Ray's comments on Andy's 'Just Finished' thread. I didn't feel it was right to continue the debate there so here we are.

I agree with Ray's comments to some extent. However, I get the impression that a lot of you guys are now splitting engraving into 'artistic and/or production' and, in my opinion, this is getting into very dodgy territory. The Evans guns that I posted a couple of weeks ago are a fine example of what I mean. I had the luxury on this pair of only being hassled every few weeks by the gunmakers. I refused to rush them because I wanted them to be something special to the client and to me they had to be right. Unfortunately this has meant months of no money coming in because of this principal (much to my partner's chagrin), and I suppose this makes me an 'artistic engraver'.

Now I have another pair of 'stock' guns which they want engraved to an old, very nice, design. I can do this type of scrollwork standing on my head, eyes shut, and hands tied behind my back (just kidding, lol, but you know what I mean). I am not about to turn this work away just because I'm an 'artistic engraver' now. Mortgage, bills, groceries...they all need money to pay for them. I don't see this as any lowering of my standards because it's production work. In fact, quite often I am head hunted because I can do this type of scroll in the 'old fashioned look' which so many modern engravers find hard to replicate.

In my opinion we sometimes look at artists through rose coloured spectacles. In the past, an artist (if he was any good) won a commission and ate. If he was crap, he starved. It was an artist's dream to have a patron willing to support him (eg, Vermeer....watch 'The Girl With a Pearl Earing' and you'll see what I mean).

So nowadays, if you're retired/semi retired or a hobbyist engraver who can take 6 months to engrave a knife, that's ok.....You're an ARTIST. But if you have to make a living at it, and whoever is making/supplying the knife/gun wants to make a living too, you have to turn things around fairly quickly or everyone in the chain will starve.....sorry, you're no longer an artist, you're a PRODUCTION ENGRAVER. I think this is a load of rubbish. There are good and bad artistic engravers just as there are good and bad production engravers. There are production engravers with artistic flair and tendencies and some with none whatsover but what they do is excellent. And there are artistic engravers who could never make a living at engraving but just do it for the sheer pleasure and joy of creativity. So please, let's not get into the why's and wherefores of Artist v Production or it will just create another split when we should be embracing engraving as a whole and enjoying the new renaissance.

[biggles]

Hi Marcus

Good points. For me personally as a hobby engraver (and a new one at that) I see the word “artist” in a very loose sense because it has different meanings to different people. To me engraving is engraving, some good, some bad and some wow. I see all engravers with various levels of skill as artists the same as I see painters or potters. How much money they can get for their work is another thing that is determined by skill level, reputation etc. I suspect that all of the people that own a gun engraved by you think it is a piece of art. They have taken the time to buy a quality gun and get a commissioned engraving on it by a well known engraver who cares about his work and within their budget. I bet they take the gun home, show the wife, kids and friends and admire it for years afterwards. The amount of scroll work etc is irrelevant so long as it's well executed. I personally would call that art and I reckon your clients do as well.

We all have to put food on the table and I personally don’t think we can produce works of art every day but we certainly can be artists every day we are at work.

I also think it’s a really nice way to complement and acknowledge someone when they have done an exceptional job on a knife, gun or whatever.

Besides all that, if history is anything to go by, don’t we have to die before our work becomes really valuable?

Well that’s my 2 cents worth. Good topic

Cheers
Andrew Biggs

[Ray Cover Jr]

Marcus,

I understand your logic. But here in the states the division has existed for many years.

I think part of our seperation on this issue is semantics. When I am talking about a produciton engraver I am not talking about someone who can cut scroll well, clean and in a timely manner.

Here a produciton engravers priority is production, quality too often takes a back seat, way back, often several cars back. Produciton engravers are guys who sit in a factories shop or subcontract to a factory to cut XXX peices a week. They are cutting the facotries pattern over and over and over. There is no creative process involved. The more they can cut a week the more they make.

That is different from doing a one off simple scroll job from time to time for a gunmaker in which you created your own design (maintaining the creative process) and worked at your own level of quality.

I have done plain and simple scroll jobs and still do from time to time. However, I do not let quality slip just to make a buck. I don't leave hammer marks all over the place and uneven backgrounds and overcuts just to get the job out the door for the boss. I have done one production job in my carrer. When it was finished I swore never again and I never have. Frankly, I lost money on that job as well because I refused to do sacrifice quality for speedy work.

Has there been some animosity in the ranks over this division? Yes, I beleive there has been some. Especially when production engravers are doign very low quality work and trying to pass it of as fine art level engraving (usually it is the manufacturers marketing dept. doing this and not the engraver himself). On the reverse side of the coin, fine art engravers can develop the habbit of looking down on producitoon engravers as low level hacks.

Frankly some production engravers want to do good work and they have a standard of pride in their wrok. However, they have the 800 pound gorrilla standing over them with the whip and they have to cut corners to make the boss happy. This tends to drive the good engravers out of the production end of the business. At least here in the States it does.

There is nothing wrong with produciton work but I don't think it is right to call that type work artwork. It is production work.

Ray

[Marcus Hunt]

Ray, I agree with you 100%.

We have the same thing here with the guys who work in the factories of the main 2 ' best gun' makers. They have to produce too and the quality ain't that great for what is a £40k+ gun, it shouldn't be allowed but accountants run these firms nowadays not gunmakers. Funnily enough, the smaller makers who have no choice but to use outworkers to make their guns and rifles tend to get a better engraving job than the big boys because unless Joe Public specifies he wants a particular engraver to engrave his gun and is willing to pay slightly more he gets the factory standard, which isn't always that great. But sometimes, I too have to follow makers particular patterns. The only artistic input I have is to cut it well and to the best of my ability, so at times like this I'm a production engraver and was taught by my father to cut commercially. But he always drummed into me 'Never sacrifice quality for quantity, give them a bit less but make sure it's the best.' So I've always tried to stick to this credo.

Marcus

[ron p. nott]

Ray i must agree with your opinion , you are right and you and i have seen some of this butcher work on some of these production jobs . i too refuse to do that type of work ,i do like to be creative in my work and i do try . i am not a Ray Cover or a Steve Lindsay but i do try to do nice work .. yes i do work for 2 different gun mfg. and when i took on there work i told them that it would not be rushed work and kick it out the door and i wont work under a dead line . s&w asked me to work for them , they wanted 1 gun a week full coverage i told them i cant work for them and i will not do that type of work .. Ron p.

[lgrif]

I have two standard lines I tell my students.

1-The difference between a $400 job and a $4000 job is the number of lines not the quality of the line. For those that want to pursue a higher paying clientele and bigger jobs, one must usually first prove one's ability to do the type of work that clientele desires. It means we must often spend more time than the budget justifies.

2-The last 5% of perfection will require 75% of your time. Life's realities dictate that for most of us we must strike a balance between productivity and perfection.

I've avoided the term artistic and have usually chosen to use the words production (you are given the pattern and cut it, perhaps many times) and custom (you create the pattern). I've seen well cut as well as poorly cut production engraving and I've seen well cut as well as poorly cut custom.

Some engravers enjoy the cutting and sweat blood when asked to design and others receive great satisfaction from both the designing and the cutting. It is a blessing to have the gun companies offer production engraving for those who love to cut and for the consumer who doesn't have enough money to pay for custom work. This is an introduction to engraving and sometimes those consumers when their wallets grow fatter move on to custom work. Market growth is good for all.

As a final note under this definition of custom work I have done some relatively small jobs. Sometimes they were perhaps artistic and other times...................

[pilkguns]

When I was cutting full time, I tried to keep a little of both around. The custom/artistic/high end jobs that I found mentally and spiritually fulfilling was the bulk of time, but having a few production jobs was also nice to have around. Sometimes, you just hit a design mental block and you can be dead in the water for 2 or three days while your brain figures out what the design should be. This is where its nice to have some production stuff, and just light into the scrolls like there was no tomorrow on relatively simple stuff, that you could cut upside down and asleep, and sooner or later it would out would come the magic solution for the artistic piece. Your hands were busy putting chips on the floor so you were’nt starving, and mentally your subconscious was solving the other problem. It’s also nice to have production stuff to do when you have lots of other acitivities going on and can’t really get your head into a big design.

Of course as mentioned by others, there are two levels of production work as mentioned, that is executed well and and that that is just executed. An artistic engraver will always strive to do his best, whether it’s a full custom job costing thousands of dollars or your neighbor innocently asking your put his name and favorite rusty old fishing knife. But its hard to expect to make a living doing artistic engraving starting out. It will take a lot of blood sweat and tears, not to mention low pay to get to where you can make decent living off of custom engraving. It’s a long hard pyramid to climb both in terms of your learning curves, and finding the cliental to pay you for that high end work, because its much easier to find a 100 people who will pay you to do a $200 job than it is to find 10 people to do a $2000 showpiece, or even harder to get that one who will pay $20000 for a masterpiece. That is a whole nothter topic worthy of discussion, but back to the production discussion, honestly these last few years, that I have been in the airgun business,
http://www.pilkguns.com/
most of what I have done is what I would label production work. Doing the miniature copies of the Holland & Holland patterns on their knifes falls into this category. Because of all the back and forth between the phones and the computer and the showroom, its hard for me get into a big project when every two hours or so , sometimesl less, I am having to get up and totally switch gears mentally to talk about match guns. I do still do a few nice things a year, but those are relatively small as well. I do have some big projects in the works, but have not been able to finish them.

Somewhat along these same lines, my how-to subject in David Darom’s new book, was on engraving design and touched briefly on the design issues between a production layout versus a custom one, as well as scroll design aspects that are dictated from the shape of the object or patterns present within the object. It’s really a brief discourse after all the editing, but David worked back and forth with me and I think for the size/time/budget constraints, it’s a good read for engraving clients as well as beginning to moderate level engravers.

[Marcus Hunt]

Scott and Lee, I think you both make some very relevant points. Custom engraving is a pretty tough field to get into and build a reputation at. An engraver friend of mine over here worries about the threat of more people learning engraving. He thinks they'll all come into the business and undercut us. I told him that once he's established a reputation for producing good quality work people will want him to engrave for them, not Billy No-Name. If they want to make a living at engraving they will have to undergo the same pattern as we have of touting for work, working for peanuts and the long days and nights and weekends before hitting the premier league and demanding due recompense for our labour. I then told him to think laterally, away from just gun engraving. I think there is a whole new world of things to be embellished with our art/craft and this is just the renaissance of it.

The air tool makers have a lot to answer for as they've made it so much easier for people to start engraving. Long gone are the days, weeks and months of teaching muscles new tricks. Of how to get the right rythm of hammer on chisel without thinking about it....of making the tools become extensions of your hands. When was the last time anyone with an air graver/gravermax slipped and stabbed their hand to the bone? God that hurt! Slicing fingers open on sharp screws ....all things of the past. But what these tools are doing is opening new opportunities for artists to venture into new fields such as engraving. I feel that this will give engraving greater exposure to the public at large but as you say not everyone will have the big bucks to spend on custom engraving, hence the 'production' boys and girls will be able to serve another part of the market.

But whether you are an Artist or Production Engraver or both at times (which I think most of us, in the UK at least, are) what should be encouraged is good craftsmanship. There is no excuse for poor engraving in my book. It takes as long to cut a scroll cleanly as it does badly.

What I seem to be gleening from all this is that (in the US at least) production engravers don't seem to care. To them engraving is just a job like a typist in a typing pool. They have no creative input so none of their soul is put into the piece. Maybe this is the difference, what do you all think?


Marcus

ps, Scott, what's the title of the new book you're talking about?

[Marcus Hunt]

A couple of John Ruskin quotes, both are very apt and the first, I'm sure you already know, is a truism if ever there was one, (potential clients please take note this applies to engravers and engraving as well):

"It is unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better."

The second quote is cliched but a nice thought anyway:

"When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece."

[lgrif]

Marcus,

I suspect production engravers/ engraving in the US is not much different than across the pond. For some engravers I'm sure it is probably just a job and for others they would like to do more custom type work and certainly take pride in their production efforts but it usually comes back to paying the bills and kicking out work. The price is usually set for production patterns and one makes money by getting it done therefore quality can take a hit. What most of us here are talking about is the mindset to seek excellence and push ourselves constantly to improve.

[Ray Cover Jr]

Marcus,

just a thought on competition and the enlarging of the market.

I think you are right. I have seen that bare out in real life. 30 some years ago there was a handfull of custom knifemakers. Just enough to get a guild to gether and keep it going. There were enough collectors to keep them afloat. Over the years the number of people making handmade knives has multiplied like rabbits. The number of collectors has grown with it because of all the exposure the sheer number of makers has given.

What happened? Well as the number of makers grew exposure grew. major shows popped up adn grew the collector base even more. magazines dealign specifically to cusotm knives grew even more exposure. and the chain has just kept growing with the web. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of makers accross this country there are also hundereds and hundreds of collectors at various levels. Enough so that the good makers do not have to worry too much about making it unless they are just totally incompetent when it comes to interacting with people.

I see the same pattern happining with engraving. Here in the States engraving has become popular in many other fields than guns and knives. I see it making a revival in jewelry. A local jeweler even advertises that he has the only hand engraver in the state (Obviously he is uninformed). About 1/3 of my business now days is on hand made fountain pens. That field is hungry for engravers. I have seen Orvis and other fly rod companies promoting engraved reel seats on rods, the list goes on and on. Engraving is in a Rennasaunce right now and I think that if it continues we engravers are going to have a hard time keeping up with the demand.

Ray

[Ray Cover Jr]

Alex I wnt to thank you for putting aspell checker on here. I wish I would have used it five minutes ago,

[Tim Adlam]

Excellent thread Marcus.

I've always approached this trade with the mindset that to be an accomplished, well-rounded engraver in steel,
one has to take on all jobs [including the odd request] that comes his/her way.
You can get ideas on technique and style from books, etc., but it takes "doing it" to create a foundation built upon experience.

"Production" and "Artistic" are interchangeable labels to me.
Sort of a Yin-Yang relationship.
I couldn't go forward without one or the other.
The important point is that the level of quality never varies between the two.
The defining point I leave to the recipient to judge what is art or not, because each piece has a part of my soul in it.
Similarly, how can you love one of your children more than the other? Each has their merits...and their moments!

I don't believe that production engraving workers operate as uncaring robots, even with the mighty hand of management
hovering over their heads.
Somewhere there has to exist the desire to express oneself, no matter what the task.

So, it's my belief that a true artistic mind is cursed by never having the indulgence of resting on his or her laurels.

Marcus, your friends comment echoed the same words I heard from a well known knifemaker many years back.
"Too many new knifemakers getting in on our action"!
No slight against your friend, but I found the comment made by that knifemaker both narrow-minded and insecure.
The engraving trade needs an arms-wide-open approach for any and all who wish to get on board.

This "Renaissance" depends partly on promoting the worth of our efforts to the public mind.
This is how I see it:
More practitioners equals greater public awareness.
Public attention leads to education.
An educated clientele increases the demand for quality and innovation.
The bar gets raised all-around.

Revolutions and artistic movements are led by artisans and free-thinkers, not politicians and their like.
It's up to us to decide where we want to go from here.

Tim

[CWKnifeman]

I have to agree with Tim the more prectitioners that are out in the public eye the more aware the public is about engraving. I had a potential customer who wanted coverage on an oner/under gun a few years ago. For what he wanted I quoted him a certain price and he thought that that was to high. I asked Ron Smith waht he thiught of the price and he said he thought it was fair. Basically he was wanting $1000 job for $400 so as new engraver I said no thank you. Ron lives about thirty minutes from me even though we don't see each other very much I respect his presence and knowledge very much. He said never undersell yourself. What he was saying was this do it right ,and if it isn't right don't do it. Ralph Bone said basically the same thing if you are going to engrave, do the best that you can, if you do that then you have done the best for the customer. Wheither you do it as a production engraver or as a custom engraver you should always do the best that you can do. This is the difference between an engraver and someone who just puts scratches on something.

[pilkguns]

Scott . . . just received a pre-release edition of David Darom's latest book on Custom Knifemaking Projects featuring a nice two page spread on your work. Congratulations!

Regards, HILTON
South Africa