Glass Engraver

The Glass Engraver is a Directory of Professional Glass Engravers in the UK.  Glass Engravers are highly skilled and possess all the necessary equipment and skills to produce the finest results.

There are many ways to engrave glass and crystal, producing a variety of results.  At the 'art' end, there are hand engravers, while at the commercial end, sandblasting equipment, lasers and machines are utilised.

Hand Engraved Glass

Glass Engravers who engrave by hand are highly talented and you can find out more about hand engraved glass, its tools and the people who offer hand engraved glass, on this website.  Hand engraving is time consuming, but the effects are often astounding.  Generally, the preference is for crystal, rather than glass, due to the softness of the material.  One should therefore use the term Crystal Engraver and the finished effect being Hand Engraved Crystal.  A Crystal Engraver requires some input into the selection of crystal to be used in the commission, because it is effectively a ‘blank canvas’ for the finished Hand Engraved Crystal.

A Balmoral Glass hand engraved Tumbler.

Glass Engraver

The finest image precision and the best looking of the commercial glass engraving is produced by sandblast engraving.  You can see, pictorially, how sandblast glass engraving is achieved and most people find this form of Glass Engraving of interest - certainly not what you may imagine!  It results in deep cuts, with crisp lines, which are of a matt white 'frost' effect.  Sandblast Glass Engravers spend a little more time than any other form glass engraving, but create a far superior effect.

The other forms of Glass engraving; those by laser or machine, result in a series of lines, needed to create any width of image.  This is due to the amount of 'passes' the laser or machine has to make to create the line thickness.  A laser uses 'impact' to create an image, which results in thousands of tiny indents, which, when viewed closely, look like tiny craters.

A Glass Engraver who uses high quality equipment for sandblasting, can also achieve Photoengraving.  This is an interesting way to portray either a photograph or graphic image.  The image is turned into thousands of tiny dots, which are sandblasted into the glass or crystal.  The closer together the dots, the more white, the further apart, the more black.  By graduating this method, the entire image can be portrayed in greyscale.

The Glass Engraver turned the image into a Photoengraving