I've gotten into tooling leather to do personalized items like bookmarks, book covers, etc. Mostly what I'll do is the persons name in a special font. I'm always trying to keep the letters themselves untouched and the surrounding modified. I've used the shader tool to make them pop but I've had no luck with the bevel. I'll cut and tool with the bevel but the effect is barely visible.
There is a good example of what I'd like to be able to do with the lettering in this post: http://leatherworker.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=17159
So here are the questions:
-From what I describe what do you think I'm doing wrong?
-How deep (1/2, 3/4?) do you cut for letter work?
-I'm using 5/6 leather, anything to keep in mind?
-From the example in the other post, what tooling do you think is done to get that nice dark outline to the letters?
-What kind of finish would complement the beveling and make it "pop"?
I'm sure some if not all of these are really novice questions but hey, when you don't know you don't know!