Custom work usually starts with someone telling me what they want.
But I’ve learned that what someone asks me to put in the artwork isn’t always the most important part of the request.
Sometimes the real question is:
Why do you want this?
There might be a place attached to it.
A person.
A memory.
Something they did together.
Something that makes an otherwise ordinary object mean considerably more to them than it would to me.
That’s what I’m trying to find.
Then comes the difficult part.
I still have to turn that into artwork.
A customer can bring me a reference photograph or describe exactly what they imagine, but not everything translates directly into an engraving.
Composition matters.
The material matters.
The way light and darkness will work on the finished piece matters.
And occasionally what someone describes literally isn’t what I believe will produce the strongest version of what they’re actually trying to capture.
That’s where custom work gets interesting.
My job isn’t to ignore what the customer asked for and make whatever I want.
It’s also not to stop making artistic decisions.
I’m trying to understand the reason behind the request well enough that I can make those decisions in service of it.
The best result isn’t necessarily when a customer says, “That’s exactly what I described.”
There’s something better.
It’s when the finished piece contains meaning for that person that someone else looking at it would never completely understand.
That’s when a custom engraving stops being a collection of requested elements.
It becomes theirs.
— Rune Master