Engraving on Ivory

[Ray Mighells]

Here's my first attempt at engraving on Elephant Ivory. The piece was 1.5" X 2.25" and less than a 16th thick. I didn't use Photograv, only PhotoPaint. Anybody tried photos? Ivory cameos used to be popular, but they were sculpted.

[Frank Corker]

Ray that turned out very well, but I think it would have been even better with an image processed through photograv. This stuff actually does cut fairly well but I never had the opportunity to use a piece this large so I'd have to say no. If you took the piece and rubbed it on some wet and dry the ivory will smooth out a lot more and make things much easier for you too, it wouldn't take too much from that point to buff it to a high finish.

[Mike Null]

Ray

I thought I had posted earlier but was thinking of Frank and his talents for this at the time. I would suggest engraving at a higher dpi but what brought Frank to mind was his skill at converting photos to line art and how this might look as a lasered "scrimshaw" piece.

[George M. Perzel]

Hi Guys;
I don't know if I mentioned this before but Photoshop has a bunch of plugins under Flaming Pear-one of them is called India Ink which seems to work about the same as Photograv-try it
Best Regards,
George
Laserarts

[Dee Gallo]

I normally do line art on ivory and color fill, but decided to try my test photo. I did one test with PS greyscale (Stucki) and one with Photograv. I found that if you lower the power you get a lighter brown line, but more detail, whereas my usual settings for lines just made a black blob.

This ivory is 1" piano key ivory.

cheers, dee

[Greg Bednar]

Dee,
Which one is which?

[Dee Gallo]

Sorry Greg, the one on the left is the PhotoShop image and the one on the right is the PhotoGrav image. The settings are scribbled on the sides.

[John Noell]

Sorry Greg, the one on the left is the PhotoShop image and the one on the right is the PhotoGrav image. The settings are scribbled on the sides.

And the winner is...PHOTOSHOP! (Gold method, or ???)

[Dee Gallo]

This image was "fixed" before Frank's Gold method came along, so it's just my own cleanup of background, play with contrast/highlights/shadow, etc. I took the same image and processed it through PG. But I now use this image for all substrate tests so I have perspective on what will happen using a specific starting point. Too many variables makes a bad test. This kid is the grandson of a friend and he's probably in 4th grade by now!

I think the PS version is better too, even though you don't get the black-blacks.

[Greg Bednar]

Sorry Greg, the one on the left is the PhotoShop image and the one on the right is the PhotoGrav image. The settings are scribbled on the sides.

Okay Dee - thanks - nice work!