William Henry Dragonfly Bolster Knife Scales Work-in-Progress
The images above are of the finished knife, and courtesy of the good folks at http://www.williamhenry.com.
Starting on a William Henry knife scale with dragonfly theme – this is the back end bolster.
, I’ve been excavating and undercutting the pocket for the gold inlay. So far, I’ve inlaid 24 karat gold into half of the body.
The end bolster inlaid with gold and finished. This is about a day’s engraving for me. Next, the main themed front bolster…
The William Henry front bolster with the major lines engraved…and some of the wispy tail excavated for gold inlay. It’s about a full day of engraving (for me) to cut the major lines of the front bolster, and excavate the body and looooong tail ready for gold inlay, so this far has taken me two days of work…
Inlaying gold in the wispy tail – this is pretty easy as inlay goes, since it is just one width of gold wire.
Most of the gold inlaid today…
Most of the gold work is finished, except for a bit of shading detail on the dragonfly body at the end…this is the end of day three of engraving…
The gold is in and background being excavated. Next I’ll stipple the background, detail the wings, then add shadow details to the gold body. Not long for this side…this is the end of the fourth day.
Finished the background stippling today…Right now the background is just a million tiny holes (stippling). The last thing I will do is to make it even darker by inking the low spots, and wiping it off of the high spots…
With the finished detailing of the wings and the shading of the gold body, this side is finished! End of day five.
Here’s the finished scale, with the fossil ivory center inlay in place. Very pretty!
I haven’t been a complete slug over the holidays, and finished the other side of the William Henry dragonfly knife scales. Here are both sides of the scales. I took my time on Side B over the Christmas holidays, but I could probably have finished this side (since I’m pretty practiced up on this design!) in four days.
The images above are of the finished knife, and courtesy of the good folks at http://www.williamhenry.com.
Thanks for looking!
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