Collector Fact Sheets

The Engravers

When most people picture an artist, they see an old man, perhaps topped with a beret, seated before a canvas and armed with a paint brush. Yet, if you meet the artists who work at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, you would find that stereotype quickly dispelled. Spanning all ages, the Bureau's artists do not sit in front of easels, but rather sit hunched over small pieces of metal, armed with an engraving tool in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other.

Let's start from scratch here. What, you might say, are artists doing at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in the first place? After all, this is where U.S. money is made. Also manufactured here are the majority of the postage stamps circulated in this country. So, what we have here, is a printing plant, right?

Wrong. Take a closer look at the name. It's the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. And hidden away in the Bureau's Office of Engraving are 13 of this country's most talented artists.

They are engravers. Now, engraving is not a well-known art form. The engraver's medium is metal: his canvas is made of a soft metal and his "paintbrush" is a hard metal engraving tool. Some engravers specialize in pictures and portraiture; others in lettering. But the commonality lies in the technique. Usually working from a drawing, a painting or a photograph, engravers cut in dots, dashes, and curved lines of varying depths and widths into the master die.

A Siderographer, using a transfer press, transfers the completed, hardened engraving into a soft transfer roll. When hardened, this roll will be used to duplicate the original engraving again and again. It is in this way, master plates are created and from them, the alto necessary to manufacture working intaglio press plates.

The Bureau uses ink in such tremendous quantities that it comes to the Bureau in 55 gallon drums. The ink is pumped into the presses ink fountain which distributes the ink on the printing plates. The excess is scrapped from the plate by a doctor blade. A polishing wipe buffs the plate clean leaving ink trapped in the engraving. Under tremendous pressure, the inked plate and paper are squeezed together producing a shiny smooth appearance to the paper called "calendaring". In this way, the engraving is transferred to the special currency paper. All U.S. currency is produced using the intaglio method.

Take a close look at the image of George Washington on the one dollar note. Notice the detail of the image. Observe how the image is really made up of microscopic dots, dashes and lines. This is an engraved image. Other engraved images on the note: the portrait on the face, the ornamentation around the borders, the numbers, and the signatures of the Treasurer and the Secretary of the Treasury.

While most of the portraits on U.S. currency were created by artists of long ago, the new one hundred dollar note released in 1996, features the work of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's current lead picture engraver. Tom Hipschen has been with the Bureau for 27 years. He started young, plucked out of the cornfields of Iowa to apprentice at the Bureau at the tender age of 17.

During his nine-year apprenticeship (most portrait engravers apprentice for 10 years), Hipschen learned how to transfer his artistic skills to metal. The hardest part of the process, according to Hipschen, was learning to create lifelike, three-dimensional images on a piece of steel.

During his lengthy tenure at the Bureau, Hipschen has engraved many images. He's done the presidential portraits of the last four U.S. presidents and he's engraved countless stamps, including the Madonna and Child Christmas stamps of the 1980s and the 1988 series of stamps featuring carousel animals.

In fact, until the redesign of U.S. currency was announced two years ago, most of Hipschen's work was on stamps. But when word of the redesign started circulating in the early 1990s, Hipschen began working on a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. When the final design process began, his engraving of Franklin was chosen to grace the face of the note. Hipschen's work also appears on the reverse side of the note. He refined the illustration of Independence Hall, adding new elements to the engraving used previously.

According to Hipschen, the art of engraving requires a rare combination of talents. "It takes a special kind of a person to be an engraver. If you're too much of an artsy person, you won't have the discipline to sit there hour after hour scratching out one little line at a time. (It can take an engraver more than 500 hours to complete a large portrait). If you're too mechanical about it, you can reproduce the picture, but you won't get a lifelike appearance. I don't think just anyone can jump in here and learn the craft. It's only a handful of people that are really suited for this task. Most people would go mad sitting here hovering three inches over a piece of steel and chipping away one piece at a time."

Letter engraver Dixie March is another talented artist who cuts away at steel, but her specialty is the alphabet. March, one of the few females in the trade, has been a letter engraver for the Bureau for seven years. Unlike Hipschen, she went to art school. After graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, she started her engraving apprenticeship at a private company that made stock certificates, titles and the like. She ended up finishing her seven-year apprenticeship at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. During their apprenticeships, letter engravers study shapes and learn how to replicate those shapes making consecutive cuts into metal plates. They must learn different alphabets and methods of spacing.

But letter engravers do more than just letters. For example, March worked on the corner of the border of the new 50-dollar note.

Prior to the currency redesign process, March spent the bulk of her seven years at the Bureau working on the pantograph machine, inspecting and repairing plates. She has done engraving on several stamps, including the Norman Rockwell 29c, the Dove and Heart 29c, the Cog Railway 20c, and last year, the traditional Christmas Madonna and Child Stamp 32c.

March says letter engravers must have a special set of qualities, including patience, tolerance for frustration, good eyesight, excellent small motor skills, hand-eye coordination, the ability to draw and last but not least, a good set of nerves. The Engravers at the BEP spend their own time talking to collectors of currency, souvenir cards and stamps about the art of Engraving.

At this point, readers may be thinking, "This is terribly complicated. Why can't this process be computerized? Why should a person sit hunched over a piece of metal for hours on end?"

Both March and Hipschen agree that computers simply aren't on the cutting edge when it comes to engraving. "Engraving requires an eye and experience," says March. "There's too much of a human element involved." Hipschen says, "In the past two years, I've been reviewing computer systems they want to bring in to simplify designs. Computers can do wonderful things, but they can't think. You need someone to drive it. Computers can do beautiful geometric patterns, but you can't draw a good picture with it. You can manipulate images you already have by scanning, but you just get systems of lines, not a beautiful drawing."

Furthermore, there's the whole issue of counterfeiting. An engraved image is far more difficult to replicate than a computer-designed image. Hipschen says that the combination of coarse and fine engraved lines make reproduction next to impossible. "Printing will always lose a part of an engraved image. Engraved printing has an integrity you can't replicate with photocopying."