Critique Request My Hand-Engraved Jewelry – M.Fatehi

[M.Fatehi]

Hello dear friends and masters,
Thank you sincerely for welcoming me into this community.

I am a maker of silver jewelry and rings, and for the past two to three years I’ve been learning and practicing engraving. I mostly work on silver rings with gemstones, in styles that are common in my country.

The pieces I’m sharing are still at an early stage—both in design and in engraving technique—and I would truly appreciate any comments, critiques, or suggestions that could help me improve.

It would be an honor to hear your thoughts.

Thank you for your time.

 

[monk]

your work is unique and quite attractive. i do not see a need for you to improve. great contrast combined with the illusion of depth. thanks for sharing these with the forum

 

[Rockingkj]

Great work! I’m thinking I need to pound my gravers into plowshares.

 

[SamW]

Excellent work...and photos!

 

[M.Fatehi]

your work is unique and quite attractive. i do not see a need for you to improve. great contrast combined with the illusion of depth. thanks for sharing these with the forum

Thank you very much! I truly appreciate the encouragement. If you see anything I should pay more attention to, I’d be glad to hear it.

Great work! I’m thinking I need to pound my gravers into plowshares.

Thank you! And please keep your gravers—engraving is an amazing and fun craft.

Excellent work...and photos!

Thank you! I hope the photos showed the details clearly.

 

[ByrnBucks]

Good evening M.Fatehi,
Believe you just the greatest critique response one could possibly hope for, several masters of the craft recommending you keep doing exactly what you’re doing. Beautiful work have a good one.

 

[M.Fatehi]

Good evening M.Fatehi,
Believe you just the greatest critique response one could possibly hope for, several masters of the craft recommending you keep doing exactly what you’re doing. Beautiful work have a good one.

Thank you so much!
I truly appreciate the support and the critiques. Getting feedback from masters of the craft is something I don’t take lightly. I’ll keep following the advice, and I hope to share better work in the future.

 

[M.Fatehi]

Hello everyone,
After getting into digital drawing, I became really interested in it. Then, after taking Sam Alfano’s iPad design course, drawing on the iPad became even more fun and interesting for me.
I find it very useful, especially because it allows me to experiment with different types of shading.

Below are three designs I drew on the iPad and then engraved on silver rings. Since the rings I usually work on are handmade and have a curved surface in two directions and there are small differences in the dimensions of the working area from two side of a ring. Because of that, I can’t easily transfer the design directly onto the piece, so I redraw the design on the ring with a pencil before engraving.


I’d really appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback.

 

[AllenClapp]

I like the work and have no critique of the designs as such, but I do have a caution related to how the execution of the designs relates to wearing of surfaces over time. I notice that you have a lot of crosshatching in your shading. For my artistic taste, it is a little too much crosshatching, but that is a matter of design philosophy and I accept that others will love it. I am an engineer who loves to engrave and, when I put on my engineering hat, some of the crosshatching concerns me. Rings wear, even when they have wide elements on the surface. I will never forget my father's college class ring being worn so badly by wearing it daily that it was difficult to see the original design long before he died.
When the top edges of surface elements are narrow, both the pressure from contact with anything and the wear on the metal increase due to the reduced surface area. As a result, the surfaces of design elements erode faster with use than they do with wider surface element edges. This is partly because sharp edges will be quickly rounded. If the surface edge of an element is wide, there is still a lot of surface to take rubbing pressure after the sharp edges round off. However, if the surface edge is narrow, the initial rounding of sharp edges further narrows the bearing area on the top and increases the erosion of the element. It is not an even tradeoff. A surface with half the initial width of another will erode more than twice as fast as the other.
With respect to the wear issue in your designs, I noticed two things. First, most of the surface edges of elements are narrow. The design would stay in its current delightful state with wider surface edges. Second, many of those narrow surface edges have also been reduced in size by crosshatching that extends to the top (wearing) edge of the elements, which, in turn, will reduce the surface area and speed up the wear on the engraved features and the clothing with which it is contact.
If any crosshatching on elements with surface edges is limited to side areas significantly below the surface, the crosshatching will likely be just as visually effective but it will not speed up erosion of the outer surfaces. Your design is perfect for someone who will rarely wear the ring, but maybe less perfect than it could be for someone who will wear the ring daily and hopes to pass it along as an heirloom. Making the backbones and leaf edges a little thicker would greatly reduce the wear.