blending colors

[Micah]

This might be old hat to some or many of you but I was just playing around and found a great way to blend from one color to another without resorting to airbrush or other tricky methods. One of the guitar straps I'm making will be deep red blended to black borders so I've been experimenting with that for a while. Anyway, I grabbed the wool dauber I've been using for pro oil dye red. It has not been used in at least a week or two but still contains enough pigment inside to gradually rub off onto the leather with some good rubbing and rolling. Next I did the same thing, but working in the opposite direction, with my black dye dauber. You can see the results on my two test pieces below (the hard black border and kanji on the fob were done before all of this, fwiw).

Took a little bit of patience and keeping an eye on the big picture to get the shading right but it looks a megaton better than the other stuff I have tried! This might take some time to do on the strap, given it's size, but I can deal with that right now. So, what I've done now is set aside 2 daubers for each color of dye, then by alternating between the two I will always have one that has some leftover "juice" to it without having to wait for it to dry out enough first.

Anyway, like I said you probably knew this already but maybe it'll help sombody else out