Snags

I'm half-way through carving a tagua nut netsuke and have hit difficulties, wanting to engrave a simple design on the back, but being completely new to engraving in any form. That being so, I've been practising the art on odd bits of nut for what seems like weeks, but the results are crude; the line's still uncertain, wobbly, even, and I'm getting more and more frustrated.

I know there's no substitute for continued practice and I'm determined to get it to the state where I feel confident enough to tranfer the results to the real thing. If I don't learn to do it now, I'll have to learn how to do it later, so it's a question of just ploughing on.

What I am learning, though, is while I'm quite confident about transferring the crafts I know, like dyeing and staining, to netsuke, when it's something I don't know, then I'm back to crudity and lack of confidence. What is odd, though, that I had no such issues when starting to carve in the first place, so I still can't really understand why engraving is such a problem. Oh, well, it's all in a good cause, I suppose. Moan over!

Erm, a revelation's just happened and might help. How daft can you get?

I visualised the results of what I was carving quite strongly before and as I was carving; I haven't done so with the engraving, even though I have sketches and drawings of what I want to achieve. In any art work I've completed in the past, I always had pretty strong internal visualisations of what I wanted to achieve, even if I changed things slightly while in the making of it. I've more of a sense now of what I need to concentrate on with etching; focus on achieving the outcome and stop fretting about tool use. Time will tell if I'm in the throes of delusion!