Turns out you can't get away from the circles! Every morning you are asked to do 1 hour of engraving practice... be it circles, lines etc to build the muscle memory and perfect the angle positioning of the graver and the movement of the ball vice. The practice does pay off eventually when you start to notice that you are able to follow a scribed line much better than before.
After finishing the Pavé stone setting exercises, it was time to move on to centre stones. For the following, cutting out the seating and setting from plate material was required and all needed relatively deep engraved circles and most of all with a straight wall edge which created either the bezel wall or the bead settings to go around the main stone.
Deep cuts are trickly! potential for history lines, step cuts, drag along the bright cut are all very very possible. Also as you scribe and offset from the inner wall of your stone seat if that isn't perfectly round to begin with there are chances your bright cut will not follow.
Each exercise had slightly different criteria for how deep the stone had to be seated. For example a bezel needed to be approximately mid way between the girdle and the table in contrast to the suspended six prong setting where the table had to be just below the surface.
Really enjoyed the Pavé set around the main stone, has a nice effect and I love how bold and how striking the suspended setting looks! Always seeking out ways to integrate these into my future works... so keep an eye out!