I thought I had settled on the idea of a small logo out of abalone--just a touch--to tie in with the rosette and fingerboard inlays. However, after trying a few ideas, I really wasn't liking the way the shell interacted with the maple... The next conundrum I had was deciding on a shape or form for my logo. It may seem like a simple and dumb thing, but when you go to do it and really think about it, the logo is really the most "graphic" element on the guitar and perhaps subject to the most scrutiny of familiarization, so it was a bigger decision than I thought. I thought of everything from a non-lame way to make an "S" (lastname) that hasn't been done already, to random symbols (but they needed some kind of connective meaning to me), to even abstract graphics of squid and evil bunnies (Donnie Darko style--I figured I would have regretted that down the road...)
In the end I decided that a black logo actually looked nicer with the overall guitar, and I found a nice way to incorporate a logo-thing that had meaning to me but was also abstract and "non-graphic" enough that I didn't end up with a demonic mythological beast or something...
In the end, I took the motion of conducting an orchestra in 4/4 time and sweetened it up a little to make a nice abstraction. It also happened to sit well within the context of my headstock.
To do this, I had to draw the form on the headstock, score it with a scribe, and file / excavate the material until I was about 1mm deep. Here's a picture of the half excavated form:
Once I had fully cleaned out the shape, I was tasked with the question of "what to fill it with to make it black?" My original idea of black epoxy turned out hard to find, so I settled on black ebony sawdust and superglue. Before I started however, I coated the surrounding maple and rosewood with a thick film of superglue (but not in the file slots) to fill the pores and prevent any ebony dust from becoming embedded in the outlying wood, which would be almost impossible to remove. Once that dried, I simply packed the gaps full of dust (allowing it to sit high) and covered in superglue (to be scraped flush later). Here's a nice shot of that:
...and here's the almost final headstock after scraping...
