Today a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle arrived at the workshop: the legendary pistol whose sheer size, among other things, has made it a frequent sight in pop culture. Its story goes back to the 1980s in Minneapolis, where the idea was born to build a pistol firing powerful revolver cartridges (.357 Magnum and .44 Magnum).
The Desert Eagle is 260 mm long, and the barrel alone measures 152 mm, so there is a generous steel surface to engrave.
The client came with an unusual idea: a design built around Tolkien’s world. It promises to be a rewarding project.
Stage 1
We start by deciding which Tolkien motifs should appear in the engraving and which to leave out. The pistol is large, but the number of striking scenes, images and characters from “The Lord of the Rings” is even larger. We also decide to draw on “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again” as a source of inspiration.
Design work always takes a lot of time and energy, and here it also calls for solid research. After several days of looking through pictures, reading passages from the books and watching scenes from the film adaptations, we settle on the first motifs…
Motifs
The first is the hand of Sauron at the muzzle (the Desert Eagle has an unusually large area around the barrel) and Smaug the dragon on the underside of the gun.
Celtic knotwork also fits Tolkien’s style, so we plan to place it on every part of the pistol to tie the design together.
Motifs. Difficult choices.
Today we continue planning what goes on each part of the pistol.
From the start it mattered that the references to Tolkien should not be too literal, so we gradually rejected many design ideas.
We were certain about the Argonath, the entrance to Moria and the Balrog: all of these were placed provisionally on the underside and top of the pistol.
The most important task (and the one that took the longest) was decorating the sides of the gun and the barrel so that one side shows the heroes of “The Lord of the Rings” and the other Sauron and his followers.
To stress this duality, the right side shows Mordor with Mount Doom, and the left side Minas Tirith, the capital of Gondor.
Invention.
The Desert Eagle comes with rubber grip panels. As the design developed, they looked more and more out of place next to the rich ornament, so we decided to design new grip panels, this time in wood.
The obvious choice was the famous map of Middle-earth: the colour of the wood makes an ideal base for an old map, and its different graphic style gives the whole pistol lightness as well as contrast.
