I attened several classes with Brian. And got to meet him once when he gave a private clsss for our chapter.
First you must realize there are a lot of methods and people who employ them .Then you MUST admitt BRIAN is da man.
But if you insist on doing accents with an Exacto knife ( like Brian,or close anyway).I'll try to tell you some of the tips he gave me.
First: locking your wrist ( as Baer described it) in an almost hook fashion will help. But more importantly is to rest the tip of the blade on your second to last finger tip. (Just as with all mat blades they FLEX) and you must do something to steady them.You do this by resting it on your finger tip and only exposeing enough to cut with.
Secondly if you want smooth cuts like BRIAN'S he explained you will need to do a couple of other things.
a.) Do not ever lift the blade out of the cut before reaching an intersection.( it is all but impossible to reinsert it back in the exact place you widrew it from) and that will leave burrs.
b.) Don not try to cut through a mat in ONE pass.
Instead retrace your cut three times.But the BIGGEST trick of them all is to change the angle of each sucessive pass just sligtly , so as to actually make faceted cuts too small to be seen.
The reason is that each increasingly greater angle cuts off the edge of the previous bevel and the final one removes all the fethered edges.
Now if all you want is a wiggling V-groove just be sure to hold the blade at the same angle on BOTH sides of the 1/16 or less of an inch cut and at the same depth which is controled by the placemet of the blade on your finger tip.
Now that sounds easy doesn't it? Or you can just use a cube ,or maybe a Dexter Mini cutter ( like I do) or some other hand held cutter. Realizeing MOST customers will be satisfied with much less quality than BRIAN'S.That is unless you are ( as I have been) foolish enough to display a sample of Brian's work in your shop.( which my wife Marie had him Autograph,at a demonstartion back in San Fransicoin 1986 I think,wasn't it John? )That is where we first meet Brian and John Ranes and also why the mat Brian autographed has a Pictuer of one of San Fransico's "Painted Ladies" in it and another that was cut useing Fletcher cutters ,done by John has our picture from the New Orleans show.
BUDDY
PS Barb your very nice photo's came up while I was slowly typeing ,My feeble attemps might be seen by searching back in the frame Design segment .
http://hometown.aol.com/cdrago3453/index.html