Last year, a customer named Peter sent us a photograph of a black hole.
Not a sketch. Not a logo. A photograph; the famous image of a supermassive black hole, its accretion disk glowing against the dark, a jet of plasma cutting across the frame. The image that took a global network of radio telescopes and years of computation to produce.
He wanted it on a bronze belt buckle.
The image Peter sent us as his design reference.
Turning a photograph of space into metal
A photograph and an engraving are different things. A photograph captures every gradient, every subtle shift in light and shadow, millions of shades of color compressed into a single image. An engraving is line and depth, what you raise up and what you cut away.
The challenge with Peter's image was translating something that exists as light into something that exists as bronze. The black hole itself, that absolute dark center, that part is easy. Darkness in metal is recessed surface, shadow, the absence of raised material. The accretion disk is the hard part: all that swirling, layered, luminous energy had to become a series of raised lines, each one catching light differently depending on the angle you hold the buckle.
We worked through four design directions before Peter chose the one that became the buckle.
Four design directions for the black hole buckle. Peter chose option 1 — the inverted version with the dark field and raised bronze lines.
What he chose and why it works
Option 1, the inverted composition, puts the black field as the background and brings the accretion disk forward as raised bronze. It's the most faithful to the original photograph in terms of feel: dark, dense, the swirling disk catching the light. The jet of plasma crosses the buckle diagonally, breaking the circle, giving the whole piece a sense of movement.
In bronze, the raised lines of the disk have a warmth the original image doesn't. Space is cold. Bronze isn't. There's something interesting about that; a cosmic event rendered in a material that's been worked by human hands for thousands of years.
The finished bronze buckle. The raised lines of the accretion disk catch light differently at every angle.
Why he ordered a bronze belt buckle
After we delivered the buckle, we asked Peter what drew him to this particular image. His answer is worth reading in full.
“I chose it because I think it’s important to think about your place in the universe. The cosmos have existed for a really really long time, and they’ll exist for an even longer time after we’re gone. But not an infinite amount of time. Eventually, black holes will swallow up all the mass of the universe, and our descendants will have to figure out how to keep surviving, generate energy or leave the universe somehow. Sounds a bit scary, but it’s not the first time life has been up against a challenge. I think the people of the future will figure it out! We have an uncountable number of years to do it anyways. But not if we don’t start thinking about it now.”
— Peter Lillian · peterlillian.com
What a custom buckle actually is
People order custom buckles for a lot of reasons. A company logo. A fishing trip. A ski group that’s been meeting for twenty years. A retirement. A wedding.
And then occasionally someone like Peter comes along with a photograph of the end of the universe and a reason for wearing it that has nothing to do with belonging to a group or marking an occasion. He wanted a daily reminder of something he believes, that scale matters, that time is long, that thinking about it now is worth doing.
That’s what a custom object can do. Not just identify you or commemorate something, but hold an idea. Carry a reminder you’ve chosen to carry.
We’ve been making custom belt buckles in Seattle for over twenty years. We’ve made buckles from blurry photographs, hand-drawn sketches, paper plate drawings, and now a photograph of a black hole. What we need from you is an idea. The rest is our job.
The finished black hole buckle. Bronze, 3" x 1.5", handmade in Seattle.
Engraving on the back of the buckle is included in the price. Bronze, 3" x 1.5", handmade in Seattle.
Start with a logo or an idea. → steeltoestudios.com/products/custom-logo-belt-buckle
A gift to mark the moment.