Cyberthrasher

If you decide to part them out, there are several pieces I'd be interested in. I just can't afford the entire set right now.

Hey Tossik. Those really are beautiful and an excellent price. I'd love to add them both to my bench. I'm kind of a knife whore I'll send you a PM now.

Thanks Bill! That rise really does take a lot of climbing sometimes. I probably spend more time studying new techniques and design elements then I do actually working on leather. But it's all worth it in the end when I get responses like these. It reminds me why I had a passion for art growing up, and why I'm glad that I've managed to rekindle that passion after so many years away.

I'm not all about skulls, which is why I enjoyed doing this one to prove that to people who may think that's all I can do and may have been holding off on ordering. I'll have to take a look at the French stuff. A lot of the things I've been studying have been Victorian scroll work and renaissance anatomy. Just haven't had time to apply it to leather as of yet. I'm actually planning on doing a series of DaVinci pieces down the line.

Thanks Macca! It's not really my cup either.....where's the skulls???? Seriously though, I'm always pushing people to embrace ART in what we do and to not be afraid to move outside our comfort zones. Even if something's not personally my style, I do try to embrace it and show myself and the world that I'm up for the challenge. I've always tried to think past what I like personally and enable myself to provide art to those I'm working for. Taking that approach, it allows me to develop a piece that I like because it's my design, while also providing the customer with subject matter that they enjoy. Designing this from scratch, I gained a lot more respect for the Sheridan style that's done well. It also helped me to be able to view it all differently now and see more of the intricacies that the masters put in their stuff. That's actually the primary reason I push people to draw their work, and trace it to the transfer paper by hand. When you KNOW your design, it really shows. Designing it yourself, you know what goes where and why which allows you to accurately represent it in your tooling. The kind of stuff that's a lot harder to grasp when using a craftaid or copying somebody else's patterns. But, I still want some skulls in it, with more classic Victorian stuff!!!! THAT'S my real goal and the kind of thing I really love

Thanks Guys. I'm quite proud of it. I never expected to really do any kind of western design, so this was quite the little trip for me to design and tool with no prior experience in the style. The more I look at it, the more I realize it actually has a lot of Victorian styling to it as well. We can tell what I've spent a lot of time looking at

Well, here goes my first shot at the classics on it's way out the door.

Neither can I!! Too bad life keeps preventing me from finishing it up. All I gotta do is get time to finish and antique. I don't know why that's so hard.

Thanks! It's definitely one of my favorite pieces.

Thanks everybody. This really has been a fun experience in learning how to step outside my comfort zone with my art.

So, I JUST took off my very first cuff that I ever made myself because my own sweat has rotted the leather. Here are some thins I learned after the fact. 1.) it clearly needed to be sealed on the inside to prevent sweat absorption. That would have kept it from both rotting the leather and darkening the color to an extreme. 2.) The salts in the sweat corroded and rusted several snaps. I replaced them a few times throughout the life of the cuff. Lining it OVER the snap where it contacts the skin is vital to protect the hardware and also cuts down on any irritation. That's especially important if the customer happens to have any nickel allergies. The reason it's junk now is because it had taken up so much salt and sweat around the snap that the snap was corroded once again, but the leather around the snap hole was also shot making it so that no snap would ever sit in there securely again. So, line that puppy with a thin lining leather. Then seal it with at least a few LIGHT coats of Resolene as Eccho said.

here's an updated picture. I'm just about ready to wrap it up.

Thanks Odin

Thanks guys! I really wish the customer would have sent me a photo of it on his bike. It's always a bummer when you can't see the final result.

No airbrush here. It's just hand brushing using an acrylic "wash" technique. I've actually never used acid or bleach on anything.