Engraved from a picture you send us
Personalised A5 vegan-leather notebooks, £17.99
Send a face, a dog, a house, a drawing done at the kitchen table, or a note somebody wrote out by hand. It is redrawn as line art the laser can trace, and you caption it however you like. The whole thing happens while you wait, so what you approve on screen is what gets engraved.
A photograph printed onto a cover is a photograph. A photograph engraved into one is a drawing, and that is what this page sells: your picture redrawn as line art the laser can trace, then cut into the hide in-house, with nothing printed on top of it. It is also why the preview is not a nicety here. You see the finished line art on the cover, at the size it will be engraved, while you still have the option of sending a better photograph. After you approve it, this is what happens.
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Take the photograph properly and everything else is easy
Almost every disappointing result on this page starts with the picture rather than the engraving. Lay the drawing or the letter flat, stand directly above it, and use daylight from a window, because a ceiling light puts your own shadow across the paper. For a face, fill the frame with it and pick a shot where the background is doing nothing interesting, because a busy background becomes busy linework. Give it ten quiet minutes, and not at midnight on a phone. If the first one comes back wrong, you will see that on screen and can simply send another.
Three different things arrive as a photograph
A child's drawing is redrawn as line art the laser can cut, with the child's name and age set beneath it, and the wobbles are the point: a tidied drawing is a different child's drawing. Handwriting is treated differently again. The writing alone is lifted off the paper with the letterforms left exactly as they were written, because redrawing somebody's hand invents a person who does not exist, and that is what makes a recipe card, a leaving card or a letter from somebody no longer here worth engraving at all. A portrait is the third, and wants a caption underneath it doing the work a title does.
Who this ends up being for
This is the page people arrive at when the present has to be from a particular person rather than about them: a grandparent with the artwork already on the fridge, a parent at the end of the school year holding the drawing that came home in a book bag (the one present nobody else on the class list can give), or somebody carrying a recipe in a hand they will not see written again. The common thread is that the artwork exists and is currently on paper, which is the most fragile place for it to be. Everything here moves it onto something that gets carried around instead.