News
TUSK Q&A with George Macdonald, Grant Macdonald London
Grant Macdonald London are proud to support the work of the charity TUSK. ‘Ruaha’, our handcrafted silver lion measuring 51cm long will be auctioned at the TUSK ball at Kensington Palace on 9th May. Retailing at circa £50,000, we are delighted to donate this work of art to TUSK.
How did you first become involved in TUSK?
I have admired the work of Tusk for many years and because of their connections to craftsmanship and the arts, it made perfect sense to work on a partnership with the charity. Silver sculptures of elephants, lions, rhinos etc are nothing new, a...
Palm Fronds by Grant Macdonald London
It’s amazing to consider how many centuries of design and craftsmanship these silver palm fronds represent. Although advances in 3D resin prototyping and engraving technology means our craftsmen can produce pieces that are finer and more detailed than ever before, the core principles of casting and hand chasing the silver into a realistic palm frond, are the same now as when London’s Silversmiths first established the capital as the centre of the silversmithing world, back in the late 1600s.
What’s really amazing is, even...
Grant Macdonald London Strata Tableware
Fine bone china remains as remarkable today as it was over two hundred years ago, when the first English potters pioneered the use of bone ash in the creation of porcelain. It’s generally reckoned the legendary Staffordshire potter Josiah Spode first perfected the process of making fine bone china around 1790, by experimenting with the mix of clay and minerals used in traditional potteries to make a product that was stronger and more heat resistant.
Spode’s magic ingredient – bone ash...
Silver Cutlery Then and Now
The relationship between the silversmith and the cutler (or cutlery seller) is a very long one. To put that into perspective, let’s take a step back in time, and consider how this most ancient of things is undergoing a remarkable high-tech renaissance in the Grant Macdonald London workshops today.
Silversmithing is an ancient craft. The use of silver can be traced back into antiquity as far as the Babylonians and Egyptians in 4th millennium BCE, although the sort of tooled smithing...
Luke Orford, CAD-Smith
Meet Luke Orford, our CAD designer and 3D Printing expert, who is helping the workshops blend the latest rapid prototyping technology with the centuries old skills of the master craftsmen at Grant Macdonald London. The results are hand-made, finely crafted works of art that simply couldn’t be produced a decade ago, and production processes that blend the best of high tech engineering with the very finest quality silversmithing.
After graduating from UCA Rochester (like Zoë – see her post here) Luke was already experimenting with 3D modelling software like Cinema 4D, Rhino 3D and Blender, one of the few people...