scrimshaw.com

Rod Lacey is a busy and productive artist. This is from February of 2020, on a knife he’d made some years back. My comments and edits will appear in italics from an email he’d recently sent.

“[This] scrimshaw will be on a “Fighter Knife” that I made years ago. The knife blade is 440c stainless steel with Snake Wood, Sterling Silver spacers, and a Whale tooth handle.
The overall length of the knife is 320 mm, with a weight of 441 grams.”

Stage 1- 4/2/2020
The knife with an ivory handle

Stage 2- 5/2/2020
This picture shows the knife handle with the picture attached ready to cut out. (at this point the picture is just adhered to the handle, no scrimshaw has occured. If you look closely you can see where Rod has cut the paper so it will lay properly)

Stage 3 -8/2/2020
This picture shows the Tiger cut out and black paint applied. I have masked the remainder of the knife with masking tape so as not to mark the knife as I work.
A problem had arisen, when I added the black paint; the ivory is quite porous and has soaked up the paint and left a cloudy effect on the ivory, I may have overheated the ivory when I polished it.
I think I will be able to overcome this problem, “here’s hoping.” (“here’s hoping” is a well-known saying of the world-famous “Hacker,” Gareth Herring.)

Stage 4 – 20/2/2020
This picture shows the areas with black finished; now the fun starts, the color.

Stage 5- 21/2020
The background is now complete; next, I will do the Tiger. Because of the curvature of the Ivory, the picture looks out of proportion.

Stage 6- 21/2/2020
The colour is now applied, I have now finished the scrimshaw, its time for the base.

Stage 7- 22/2/2020
Not sure what wood this is, I found it in the offcuts bin at the local timber yard, I made the nameplate from Mammoth ivory.

The finished piece.

Rod chose a dramatic picture of a tiger leaping in the water. The subject and the movement would be a challenge just on a flat piece of paper, let alone a curved surface. “This picture shows the next scrimshaw I will attempt; the ivory is quite stained with a brown color because of being buried in the ground for thousands of years, this discoloration will mainly affect the white areas as the white paint doesn’t cover easily.”

(“The Whaleman’s Way” is an age-old technique of getting the map of the image you want onto the ivory. Stippling through the paper into the ivory below, you can then fill in the stipples with ink and see the outline of the image.)
“Stage 2- 27/3/2020
This picture shows the ivory with the tiger picture attached ready to cut the outline”

(I was curious as to the technique Rod used to fill in the black. Using a scribe, Rod first stippled lines top to bottom, then he went side to side, extremely closely. A bit over one month of precise stippling, at about 30 hours). “Stage 3- 5/4/2020 This picture shows the black areas filled in, next I will do the water, dang this will take some time, the solid black took enough time, but it will seem like a breeze compared to the water.”

Stage 4- 29/4/2020
This picture shows the water finished, this was very time expensive, but that’s scrimshaw. Next is the Tiger; this should be the easiest section.

Stage 5- 5/5/2020 Finished at last, contamination of the colours was a real issue with this one. (Contamination can be extremely frustrating, Each color is added individually, and whether you use ink or oil paint, it easily wicks into adjacent areas despite another color already in the scribed areas. One solution can be to mask the areas, though when you’re working in such small areas it could drive you mad. Another way is to coat the piece each time with archival ink, but this can work against you making the areas you scribe next reject the ink since the wax can seep into the ivory. This may make you need to incise deeper, causing the lines to appear rougher. One possible solution would be to use bees wax instead of archival wax which has solvents in it, then a hand polishing with a soft cloth to leave the bees wax in the incisions, but not allow it to seep into the ivory. I haven’t tried this yet, but I may soon do an a/b test to verify my hypothesis).