[Billzach]

Like steve, i don,t always preplan my carvings..Sometimes i,ll even change the subject of the carving after i had already started on a certain subject..Sometime i,ll hang a picture of the subject on the wall in front of my work bench and carve the subject by looking at the picture and cutting it out on coin, let me add something here, i,m no artist, i can,t draw a person,s face with a pencil and paper, on a scale of 1 to 10 of drawing a subject with pencil on paper i,m a 0..So even if you,re not a artist you can still carve coins, but being an artist i,m sure would make carving coins easier..here is a carving i did last week of " Ollie " ..i didn,t have the least ideal what the finished carving would be, because i didn,t have a subject in mind when i started Ollie..I,ve still have one of the first coins i carved when i started carving 10 years ago, it looks like someone took a hammer and beat on a coin with a wood chisel, it looked terrible..This is not to say your first carved coin won,t be nice and detailed, but probably not..[ps] like steve has already mentioned, everybody will develop their own style of carving coins..