Amber’s mom is a great artist who enjoys painting Missouri critters and plants. She enjoys it even more if she can work in miniature. When Amber asked her about engraving some tuner buttons, it seemed like the perfect medium. A few weeks later, she returned with the excellent menagerie pictured below: a crappie, perch, ruby-throated hummingbird, butterfly and dragonfly (I’m sure those are species-specific, too, but I don’t know which ones).

She made them by cutting lines into the plastic knobs with a sharp pen knife and forming dots with a pin held in a pin vise, then adding ink to the burrs. For the printmaking types out there, the line quality is like a drypoint intaglio.

They look totally unique, and really dress up the tenor prototype!