spacedog

I haven’t been doing much leather work lately, and then mostly practice stuff. I have been needing to finish a bag I started for my wife so I will see what I can get up to. Here are a few scraps I’ve been banging on, trying out border textures with different tools.

It looks like you are making great progress, Gezzer, in both the tooling and the dyeing. Keep up the good work.

Wow, that is top notch craftsmanship. Well done sir.

Those oak leaves are great.

Looks great.

I thought about putting something on the inside of the guitar strap, but decided not to do any tooling. Instead I put the first verse of the song, Surly Joe, that Buster sings in the saloon. At the end of the song everyone throws their hats in the air so I put some of those on the inside too. I just used some of the Bordeaux dye to paint them on.

Thanks Gezzer. I might try that option the next time I attempt something similar. Thanks Battlemunky. I gave it a shot. (Ha) Thanks Chuck. No worries, just looking for ways to keep improving. There are a bunch of clips from the movie on YouTube if you are interested.

Wow! That is very nicely done. Just excellent work.

And finally, the end. This bit got the better of me. I could not think of a way to represent the strings on the harp and also use the background tool. So I left it blank behind the harp. Again, if anyone has a solution or thoughts on how it could have been done, please comment. There might be someone else wondering how else it can be done, besides me.

Nearly done. Spoiler Alert! There are a lot of deaths in this movie, and I wanted to portray it with graves spreading to the horizon, which has “the dead man’s hand” above it. It works, but feels like I rushed it a bit, like not fitting in all the words on the ace of clubs. It should say, “Well that ain’t good”. Not sure if that qualifies as irony, or not.

This was my favorite scene in the movie, the trick shot, and it was fun to draw out, but difficult to convey the distance. His elbow and the mirror should look closer than the rest of him, and the squiggly thing beside his head is the opponent in the distance. Again it is all pretty cartoonishly drawn, but that is what I was going for. The whole figure is acrylic paint over dyed shading of the background.

The shootout/count down was tricky as the small fragment needed to stand out from the background. I thought it would get too muddled if I used the background tool throughout, so I just used it at the edge. Not sure if I pulled this off correctly, but since it is for me as opposed to being sold, not a big deal. If anyone has a different option on how it could have been done, let me know please. Obviously, it is painted with acrylic on the bones to help them stand out, and no I’m not sure about the accuracy of the anatomy.

The wanted poster turned out pretty much as I hoped. The paper is the natural leather with dyed shading for where it is curling up, and the headshot is acrylic paint.

This is the title/name plate. I tried rotating the background tool to avoid a pattern, and the letters are acrylic paint.

Finished the sewing, which did get better and more consistent than when I had initially started and got frustrated. The thing that I have noticed upon finishing the sewing is there is a bit of leather core, or tufting, around the cuts the thread was pushed through. I might have to go over it with a small brush and some dye to clean it up. Anyways, here are some pics, I have adjusted the colour in the pics using my couch as a reference since the lighting from the window changed as I went. I did this sunrise with dye, which I wish was more vibrant, but didn’t want to use paint.