Engraving

Engraving means to carve a design in a printing plate. In jewelry making, engraving is an important process. Engraving is the practice of incising a design onto a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. It is the most primitive form of relief printmaking. It is normally taken as engraving on wood but the same can also be done on metal, stone, bone or ivory. The process is motorized these days but the hand skills are needed for the pattern making.

Engraving is a general term used when the plate is inscribed directly without using any acid or light sensible chemical substance. It is used specific when the plate is incised using a tool called a burin which is a v-shaped blade designed to remove burr and make a clean sharp line. For wood, the engraving tool is called graver.

The graver is pushed along the surface of the metal leaving an angled groove. The cuts are bright and shiny. Graver and the bruin may have different shapes at the cutting edge to create different patterns. An engraver's block is used to hold the pieces of jewelry to be engraved. It is a time consuming process that requires a lot of patience and skill.

Machine engraving
Machine engraving is done with high-speed steel cutters. The trainee learns how to use the cutters with different tools, which can achieve special effects with skill. The machine engraver must also learn how to grind their own cutters also preparing letters and other designs used as a template which is followed by the pentograph process.

Processing
Engraving is the process of cutting or incising a design into a hard, flat surface, usually a metal, with a pointed tool known as a graver. In its broadest meaning, engraving can be described as the art of cutting lines in wood, metal either for replication through printing or for decoration. Engraving, in its narrowest sense, is an intaglio printing method in which the lines are incised in a metal plate with a graver.

Gravers come in a variety of shapes and sizes that yield different line types. The burin produces a unique and recognizable quality of line that is qualified by its firm, deliberate visual aspect and clean edges. The angle tint tool has a slightly curved tip that is commonly used in printmaking. Florentine liners are flat-bottomed tools with multiple lines engraved into them, used to do fill work on larger areas. Flat gravers are used for doing fill work on letters, as well as most musical instrument engraving work. Round gravers are commonly used on silver to create bright cuts, as well as other hard-to-cut metals such as nickel and steel. Burins are either square or elongated diamond-shaped and used for cutting straight lines. Other tools such as mezzotint rockers, roulets and burnishers are used for texturing effects.