I get asked this at events.
“Did you make this?”
The short answer is yes.
The longer answer is harder to fit into a conversation across a vendor table.
Because I think there’s an understandable assumption about laser engraving: start with a picture, put it into the machine, press a button, and the laser does the rest.
If only.
The artwork has to be developed for what it’s going to become.
That can mean rejecting multiple versions before one ever reaches the laser.
It can mean changing a composition that looks perfectly good on a screen because I don’t believe it will read correctly on slate.
It means deciding which information matters.
What becomes light?
What stays black?
Which details need to survive?
Which ones are going to disappear?
Which ones should disappear?
And sometimes I can have a completely usable design sitting in front of me and still decide it isn’t good enough to make.
That’s probably the part people don’t see.
They see the finished engraving.
They don’t see all the versions that never became one.
Some evenings, I can spend more time getting the artwork where I want it than the laser eventually spends engraving it.
I’m okay with that.
The laser is an extraordinary tool.
But it can only work with the decisions I give it.
That’s why, when somebody asks me whether I made the piece they’re holding, I don’t think first about the machine.
I think about everything that happened before I turned it on.
— Rune Master