I'm a CSWA who's been using Solidworks since 2014; however I am trying to do something that I never learned in the tutorials and I've never had to do before.  

A friend asked me to design a custom pistol grip for his gun.  The grip has many different curvatures to it, to follow the shape of the human hand, however on the design he wants me to imitate, the textured surface follows the curvature precisely at a set depth from the multi-curved surface.  This is what I cannot figure out how to do.  

I am trying to create a diamond stippling as my surface texture, that is 1mm deep, and perfectly follows the curved outer surface of the grip.  The only way I've been able to make the proper stippling is to create a plane that is offset inwards (inside the solid body) from the outside surface, draw a bunch of intersecting lines that form diamond shapes, the use extrude cut thin with a 50 degree outward draft to create diamond "pyramids".  

My problem is that I can only use thin extrude on a 2D sketch.  If I try and project the pattern onto a curved surface or make a 3D sketch on a curved surface of the texture, I cannot use thin extrude to create these raised diamonds shown in the image above.  I'm sure there is another way to create them, but the simplest method I've tried is this cut-thin option.  If you know another way, I'm certainly open to learning it!  

The problem I have currently, is that the texture is not following the curvature of the grip.  If you look at the bottom of the grip, the texture is inset a couple mm.  At the top it's flush.  In the middle, parts of the diamonds are cut off and flat instead of forming peaks..  

I sincerely hope someone is both kind enough and knowledgeable enough to teach my something new here, and provide steps for how to create textures such as this diamond-stippling effect on a multi-curved surface, where the effect follows the surface precisely.  I've tried using AI, but every solution it gave just lead to an endless rabbit hole that never gave me the effect I needed.