Piddle Piddle Piddle

[ED DELORGE]

Hello Ron, Thanks for sharing. Years ago I saw a few handguns that were engraved by Ben Shostle. They were engraved with a lot of what seemed to be sculptured scroll similar to what you are showing. Is this how he did it? Or did he use some other tools? I never could get a straight answer from him.

Thanks Ed

 

[Roger Bleile]

Ed,

I'm pretty familiar with Ben's relief scroll. It was done in the more traditional manner where it was outlined and the background relieved before sculpting.

RB

 

[Ron Smith]

In my observation of Ben's work, the answer is, only some of these texhniques were used, and like Roger said, his work reflected the more tradidional use of heavy cutting, but the arrangement of the cuts were considerably different. Flared cut sculpting arranges cuts that look much better without any background. If you will look at my plates, there is one that I have backgrounded around the scrolls. I don't think it is nearly as impressive as the no background approach. Check it out. What do you think?

So, the beauty of this style is to accomplish Grace, high quality, high class effect without so much time and work. This was the approach that Louis Nimschke used. This is the approach I have used. Large scrolls, punchdot backgrounds were utilized to cut down the time factor. When you start outlining elements and removing background, you move into high end time consuming work. If you look at the times recorded in Nimschke's smoke pulls, it will astound you because of the speed, while at the same time retaining quality in knowledge of design, and effect of skilled cuts. he used a liner in combination with single point on a minimal scale to get simple effects, but Nimschke could do the higher end work superbly too, but like McKenzie (is that spelled right?), he found something that was very succesful in appearance and design, and attractive and stuck with it. And you could make good money at it, so here is a little history along with a look into some simpler styles. Simplicity is often at the root of grace and as things get more complicated, grace is harder to appreciate without closer scrutiny and in the case of flared cut sculpting, it utilizes this principal to its greatest potential and it is transitional because of the arrangement of "brightcutting" techniques into traditional gun style scrolls. But polishng the graver seems to be detrimental to the value of this style, which again saves time. Shine tends to deminish the three-dimensional effect which is one of the good effects of this style.

Carry on!