Reviving de la Collombe: Custom Rossi Historical Gun Engraving Project

This exact custom Rossi is live on GunBroker right now as a Penny Auction—click here to view the listing and place your bid https://www.gunbroker.com/item/1178232418

Adapting 18th-Century French Hunting Motifs to Modern Steel

There is a unique challenge in taking artwork designed for the sweeping, hand-carved lock plates of 18th-century French flintlocks and adapting it to the flat, hard geometry of a modern lever-action rifle. This project details the complete transformation of a Rossi lever-action rifle, utilizing modern laser engraving and finishing techniques to pay homage to the legendary French master designer, De la Collombe.

*The video version of this blog is on our youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MPq9VqP6Xc

The Design Inspiration: French Baroque Hunting Style

During the early 1700s, artists like De la Collombe elevated firearms from simple tools of warfare to high art. His work was characterized by fluid, organic scrolls interwoven with highly detailed hunting scenes, classical figures, and mythical creatures. Unlike the tighter geometric patterns seen in later eras, the French Baroque style relies on a sense of movement—scrolls push forward, leaves taper naturally, and the negative space tells as much of the story as the engraved lines. In previous blogs we've already done a deep dive in the French pattern books of the 18th century, so I had an idea of the direction I wanted to go for this design.

Using Gemini to help design the Art for this Historical Gun Engraving.

Unfortunately, I'm just not that great of an artist, and although I am proficient with Adobe Illustrator, I need some extra help. I sincerely hate to admit using AI for art, but it has really opened up my world for these kind of projects. And it comes with its own unique frustrations and failures. So I started by giving Gemini a photo of the blank receiver, and several of De La Collombe's drawings.

This is the exact first prompt that I gave to it: I want to design artwork to engrave this Rossi lever action, lets start with the left side of the receiver I am providing you. I want to use inspiration from French artist De La Collombe, as I am doing a study on 17th and 18th century firearms engravings and putting them onto modern guns. I cerakoted this midnight bronze, and can do a light engraving that will change the colors to 3 shades of bronze, so I need a very high res png image that I can trace in illustrator. I want to lean into the hunting theme, so I need the hogs head motif somewhere, and then scrolls in this style, maybe a subtle dragon worked into the scrolls like in the art here. maybe a rabit or dog and deer like the inspiration. ask any questions before you get started. Some advice: It is VERY important to make it ask you questions before it gets started, that way you can figure out together the direction it will take. Once it starts generating images, it goes off the rails very quickly. So you want it to get the first image as close to perfect as possible.

And this is the first image that it produced!

I was pretty happy, but directed it to exactly replicate the boar head motif from the De La Collombe artwork rather than have that giant hog head it made. For brevity sake, I will only show a few of the failures and iterations we went through to achieve the final product, but know, that many hours went into this process.

After a few more tries, we arrived at this black and white design with the hogs head, and a dog chasing a deer. From there, I decided to engrave the first side then come back and show Gemini the results before designing the right side's artwork. I'm not sure this was necessary as we lost the plot a bit on the second side.

I asked it to use the same style as the first side, but instead, incorporate a grotesque and some additional dragons. I told it to reference these drawings for inspiration.

Gemini's first attempt at the right side of the receiver failed miserably. It incorporated a dog, dragons, and a grotesque as requested, but it did a terrible job.

The mistake that I made on this side, was that I emphasized that I would be taking the PNG that it produced into illustrator to use image trace to create a vector file. That appeared to break its mind which resulted in this first attempt.

The final product for our right side receiver artwork. It incorporates elegant scrolls, dogs chasing a hog, and a wonderful grotesque. It also has some dragons hidden amongst the scrolls.

After several failed attempts to re-calibrate, its 1s and 0s, I got it back to imagining what the finished product should look like, and we went from there. My advice is to start very detailed and let it give you a photo realistic final image, then work backward to acheiving a grayscale or black and white high res png that illustrator can trace. Another key peice of advice is to know when to give up and start a new chat. Even with the new feature that allows you to circle or highlight portions of an image, and even with using jcode or other hacks to try to direct it to make exact edits, the thing still loses the plot. So once I sense this happening, I just open a new chat and start over, this technique has reduced the frustration greatly.

So as of writing this in Spring 2026, the AIs still cannot make a reliably artistic SVG or vector file, so for laser engraving, I have to take the png it makes, upscale it, and port it over to Illustrator for the conversion.

Using Adobe to create a vector

Using the image trace feature of adobe illustrator, I was able to convert the PNG to a DXF image.

There's not alot to say about using image trace, other than finding the best settings for the art. Once the image trace is complete, I use the simplify paths feature. Then I go in with the white arrow and clean everything up to the best of my ability. Depending on the engraving process, I might use more than two hatches, in which case, I will divide the art into layers based on what I want to engrave, that way its ready to go in ezcad. This time, I was planning on leaving the back ground midnight bronze, and then doing the black lines you see here black, and the internal fill of the scrolls a lighter bronze, this meant I only needed two hatches. So after saving as a DXF I headed out to the laser.

Cerakote Laser Imaging: a modern method for a historical gun engraving.

I decided not to do a deep engraving on this project since I already had the aluminum Rossi receiver coated midnight bronze. Midnight Bronze is one of the Cerakote colors they say is optimized for this laser imagine process. I have used it for other projects and already had a test grid in place. For my laser I use settings approximating .04 hatch, 2000 mm/s speed, 10-20% power, and 300 mHz frequency. This turns the dark bronze a lighter tan color without removing any of the cerakote. For the black lines, since the receiver was aluminum I couldn't anneal for a black color, instead I removed the top coat of midnight bronze to reveal the black cerakote I had layered underneath. For this I used about two passes at my cleaning pass settings.

Final Results

Conclusion: Bridging Eras on the Bench

Ultimately, adapting the fluid, organic soul of 18th-century French Baroque artistry to the rigid geometry of a modern lever-action rifle is a masterclass in compromise. It requires a bridge between two wildly different eras of technology; wrestling with unpredictable AI algorithms on one end, and dialing in precise laser frequencies on the other. While generative AI is far from a flawless design partner, integrating it into a traditional vector workflow opens up massive creative avenues for modern craftsmen. As some methods of historical gun engraving have become somewhat of a lost art, these new techniques can bring the beautiful artwork of the past to life. The finished Rossi stands as a testament to that collaboration: a piece that honors the timeless elegance of De la Collombe's hunting motifs, executed with a precision that the old masters could have only dreamed of. It proves that while our tools may shift from hammers and chisels to software and fiber lasers, the pursuit of turning a firearm into a canvas remains exactly the same.