I’m working on some new engraved wood inlays.  I love doing these because the process is satisfying and almost instantly gratifying.  The time it takes from a sketch or an idea to a finished prototype could happen in a day if inspired enough.

Every contemporary jewelry piece at Blend Creations starts as an idea. Sometimes we actually sketch things on paper:

Many times we skip the pencil to paper stage and go right to the digital version which looks (slightly) more refined.  The advantage of working digitally is that instead of an eraser and sketchy pencil marks, there is ‘Undo’, ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste’ which allows for easy re-iteration and multiple versions until the final drawing that feels right is made:

The biggest advantage is that a digital vector file is needed to engrave the image into wood, so if you have a final vector drawing, you also have your final production file, which gives you this:

(As you can see, we’re also testing out a ‘Tree of Life’ engraved wood inlay.  We originally created this tree for the wedding invitations of some dear friends of ours who got married in an arboretum.)