Gabriel Rasa

Hey, I lost the thread of the replies, but heavily tooled leather armor is sort of my jam, so in response to your first post: No no no, you have to tool your leather BEFORE you shape it! Trying to put detailed tooling on leather that isn't perfectly flat is a nightmare. I mean, I've done it, after I did a whole piece and then decided that it needed more jazz (see the first picture -- originally it had only the dragon in the center and the border along the edges), so I took it apart and got it wet again, but it's not going to lie flat after you've already put curves in it, and it's so, so much easier just to do your tooling beforehand. The second set of pictures is for a pair of elbowpads (Isabela's from Dragon Age 2, if you've ever played it), and you can see the steps -- do your tooling and finishing (edge beveling, punch any necessary holes, etc) before you shape it. The design does get slightly distorted when you put a curve on the leather, but it's never actually caused problems for me. As for waxing, boiling, baking, etc -- honestly, I don't think it's necessary. 10 oz leather is plenty hard, especially after it's been wet-molded, so doing anything else to it is just "More Historically Accurate Than Thou" wankery, in my opinion. Both boiling and baking are touchy procedures; get the timing/temperature wrong and you run the risk of ruining your project on the very last step, and winding up with a mass of shriveled brittle garbage. Waxing is fun and much less dangerous (I wrote about it here: http://armory-rasa.tumblr.com/post/136427185638/thrall-cosplay-how-to-make-wax-hardened-leather) and you certainly don't need to dip your leather pieces, a disposable paintbrush and a hairdryer will do you fine. It's good for making pieces waterproof, and it does make them quite hard (as long as you're not wearing it anywhere warm :P), but unless you (or your customers) are going to be LARPing in the rain for days on end, again, I don't think the extra step of waxing is worth the time it takes. (Full disclosure, I sell to the cosplay crowd, not the SCA crowd, so there's less demand for historically-accurate methods and being able to withstand the elements -- but it's more that the pieces wouldn't look so pretty after combat, not that they wouldn't be able to perform.) But yeah, anyway. Do your tooling first, while all the pieces are flat. Don't even try doing it on an anvil after you've shaped the leather, it will just end in table-flipping rage.

Thanks for the tips! I bought some acrylic gold and then ran some tests today to figure out which sealant would make for the cleanest contrast. Fiebings aerosol Leather Sheen: Satin shene (and by satin shene I mean equal parts water and Mop-n-Glo): And Tan Kote: The only one that did really poorly was the resolene, with a lot of gold pigment sticking to the surface, and between Fiebings and Tan Kote, Fiebings' ozone-destroying aerosol won by a hair. So, for anyone interested in doing this effect in the future, don't use Satin Shene. FIN~

Interesting idea... did they say what you should seal the base color with before putting the t-shirt paint on?

I took a commission to do a pair of bracers like what Legolas wears in Lord of the Rings, and I was wondering if anyone had advice on how to get silver/gold pigment into a design cut into the leather, like so: (I know, the answer is probably going to be "carefully.") I've done a bit of experimenting but nothing has come out quite as tidy as I'd like it, so I thought I'd toss the question out onto the forums and see if anyone else had solved this particular problem before. Thanks for all feedback!

Oh my god, for years I lived just south of you, and now I'm in California. ::seppuku::

I'm a bit late to the party, but cuffs are what I do so I'm keen to hear what you come up with. Right now I do a lot with suede lining (see below) but I don't fold it over the top, and I think you'd have to with fur. You'd probably also have to insert another later of padding between the fur and the veg tan, both to help keep the fur from rubbing off and to make them more comfortable. What's been stopping me from venturing into fur lining is the question of how hand-stitching is going to look against the fur, if it's going to pin the hairs down funny. You might need to trim the fur shorter, which would not necessarily be a bad thing, since it would expose more of the undercoat and make them exceptionally soft, I suspect.

If I may ask, what tool did you use to get that effect? It doesn't look like any other type of backgrounding I've seen.

Jumping in way late, buuuut.... I agree with the above posters, this looks great. I'm really curious about that striated look, how it almost looks like wood. How'd you get the dye to do that? Thinned it out, and then layered up in streaks? o_O

That is a gorgeous piece of work there -- I especially like the texturing you used to add visual interest to the big blank spaces. It's details like those that make a costume look authentic, rather than cartoony, and it's the sort of thing that most people overlook when doing cosplay. Well done, you!