The Portland Engraving Project - Interm update 11.5

Interm Update

In the last update I said I wasn’t entirely happy with the figures, in particular the girl. I’d also mentioned previously that you need to hide your wheel tracks and even prior to that we spoke about various techniques. I have some work to do to get this vase back on track but before I get to that I want to outline a discussion about an engraving style/technique I had recently with a colleague.

Eamonn Hartley and I used to work for Waterford Crystal and have been friends for years. Back in the late 80’s the Anhauser Bush brewing company had ordered hundreds of items with their logo. Mr. Havel was asked to make a crystal replica of their ‘A’ logo with intertwined eagle as the main piece - this is long before glass glues had been developed and so the pieces had to ‘fit’ together. The logos were sandblasted first to give a workable template. We, the engravers then spent about 20 minutes working on the eagles to give them some depth. In a few cuts you would do its head and body and a few more would ’give you wings’ as they say! One rounded wheel was used to do the head, body and leading edge of the wing; the next (flat) wheel gave you a row of feathers, a smaller flat wheel was then used to do the beak and finally a ball for the eye. The point here was we developed a format to engrave the eagles in ‘one-touch-engraving’, utilising the wheel profile to carve the image. The finished bird was perfectly acceptable as an engraving but underlined the idea of letting the wheel do the work.

On this Portland vase I’m guilty of overworking some aspects of the figures. The girl’s head is not great – she’s more ‘butch’ than ‘beauty’. The bridge of her nose is too strong, the nose itself is too long, the ball on the end is too big, her eye is too far back and her cheek bone is too shallow. Against that we’re now too deep to apply the ‘one-touch’ idea. It’s a bit like doing an oil painting and there are now too many layers of paint to maintain any subtly. I’ve also left some spindle marks where I touched the surface in front of her nose. So, what to do?

Let’s go back to basics and work on the shallow depths first – that means sorting out the nose. I’d like it to be shorter and have a slight curve out toward the end which means bringing the eyebrow lower and deeper. We can disguise a large forehead with a little with a fringe, a few stray hairs (done with the diamond point). With that sorted, let’s focus on the eye. With a deeper eyebrow and by deepening the cheek we’re giving ourselves a higher plateau to rework the eye. Shade off the existing one, redraw a newer one rectifying the issue and engrave it.

There’s a re-occurring theme here – fixing a problem area is done by working the areas around the problem. To shorten a nose you enlarge the forehead; to repair an eye you need to deepen the cheek and eyebrow. It’s a function of intaglio/deeper is nearer style of engraving. The thing is you will eventually loose the finesse of the engraving by going so deep. Your edges will be harsh and the image will distort if not viewed from the centre point. It’s not a disaster, just a lesson.

I don’t really want to make her head any bigger so I need to get this plastic surgery and botox right.  I’m using a fine powder that cuts slower and also gives a smoother finish, perfect for doing a lady’s face. It cuts a finer line so any error will be noticeable; think back to our pencil sketches – a 7B gave a rough line, the 2B was the definitive line.

Now we’re getting back on track……………….