True Leather Artistry

When you are involved in leatherwork, you have the rare priveledge of seeing the works of true artists. These are works that you can see has been taken beyond merely a craft. The photos in this entry shows two such works I saw in so many days. The first two is a Bible that someone is going to try to use as inspiration to make his own and he has come to me for some advice.
The first very striking feature of this cover is the writing. I had it under a magnifier and carefully studied it. And I think my friend Larry is right when he says it has been done by swivel knife and then the cuts were opened with a stylus or modeling tool.
The second very nice feature of the cover, is the subtle use of resist and antique finish to give the tree trunks a lighter color and the pool that the lettering were done in.

 

I know I should have photographed it more, but it is awkward in the first place to scrutinise the Bible of someone else when it is obviously a very private and well loved book. So here I will just describe a bit: the zip was installed in the gusset without the ends of the zip being attached or tucked into the spine of the cover. I hope to make a cover like this soon so as to not forget this method of a zippered gusset, so I will show some photos then.

 

This is a still unframed picture done by a very good artist, Uchechi. The silouette work in this picture was done by simple inverted carving and backgrounding of the design. It was then dyed with chocolate brown (very dark) and a bit of airbrushing on the face and hands gave them a bit more of a three dimensional feel. The artis was going to so a few more and I hope to have pics of them soon!

 

Fine Writing

Writing on leather has always been a pain - very few option exist: You can stamp out letters, or tool them in, or have them laser engraved, but I think by far the best is writing with a wood burning pen!

I did this can cover many years ago. I was surprised to see my own very small work.

I had left my burning pen in South Africa and so I bought a new one. The tips were too big! So I filed them down. I still did not get a nice fine writing. Then I realized my original woodburning pen had a temperature control - on the net that meant a $300 layout! Disaster.

Luckily I came upon a website with instructions to build a under-$20-temp-controlled gourd burning pen. Ten minutes after I got home with the light dimmer switch, I was writing small! (I still have to build the dimmer switch into a more permanent little box....)

To see a video of me burning with the pen, have a look at my instructional blog, LeatherLearn.

A Stool from the past

 

 

 

I used a thirty year old kit for this chair (the legs were newly made by a friend) - I did replace the original latigo lace pieces with new brown latiga laces that were in beter condition.

The designs are my own - one is a simple basketweave with my favourite border around. The second corner is an imitation frog skin effect that can be seen on the www.leatherlearn.com instructional blog, and the third is just a random drawing I did.

The dyes are all the Eco-Flow waterbased dyes and then I put a coat of Drake's X1 dressing over that.