INDIAN PHOTO KNIFE - Conceptual Knife Design Done In The Late 90's

Here is an Indian 'Photo' Knife design that I did toward the end of my time at The Mint. It was to have a seraded blade and a wooden-carved handle with silver ends. There were to be some kind of gems placed on it, and I did red rubies since I thought it looked good and complemented the colors more. Blue would have worked too I think. It was a much more simplified knife than the other dragon ones I posted on my blog. The open area was to be where a photo of Geronimo or some other famous Indian figure was to be placed. I can't remember who it was supposed to be at this point though. The knives were always drawn on graph paper first to get the design balance down and then we would redraw the knife onto white paper, tracing paper or vellum and then do the color. This was colored with magic markers and some colored pencils. The sheen across the blade was done with blue pastel.

DRAGON KNIFE - Conceptual Designs For THE MINT In The Late 90's

Here are a bunch of conceptual designs I did for a Dragon Knife for The Franklin Mint in late '98. This was before the computer age of digital coloring had taken off so I used markers, pastels, colored pencils and whatever else I had around at the time. Photoshop and any kind of digital art was only used by a very small handful of artists in The Mint at that time. I went digital in 2000 in terms of doing art. From these drawings (if and when they got approved) they then went into the next phase of development, which was making an actual full-size prototype. Most of these were sketched on tracing paper or vellum since they made a lot of changes and it was easier to fix on those two papers. From that point, I'd make a copy of each drawing and then color each knife in a variety of colors and schemes with different gems and metals depending upon what the art directors wanted. Some of the designs were just left in the sketch phase and some got fully produced. Enjoy!