Floral Dove Wing Spur Straps

[brycew74]

a set of dove wings with a floral design i drew, comments and critiques appreciated

Edited December 4, 2013 by brycew74

[Bob Blea]

Hello Bryce,

There are a couple of things I see. First and foremost, it looks like your leather was too wet when you tooled it. The carving looks like it was very mushy and you didn't get much burnishing with your pear shader. Also, I see a lot of tracks left by your beveler. Proper casing will go a long way to solving these problems. Make sure your leather has dried out enough so that it is returning to almost normal color before carving.

On your swivel knife cuts for your vine work, the cuts don't flow into the vine very gracefully. Also, the cuts for where petals or vines come together are too short. Try to lengthen those lines and fade them out slowly, both as you cut them and as you bevel them. And as you make those cuts coming into the vine, make then gracefully curve into the vine and have them come to an imaginary center line running down the vine. They shouldn't ever actually reach that line but just sort of gradually fade out. Try taking a look at some of the pro's work on here, like Bob Park (hidepounder on this forum) and you can see what I mean. He does this very well.

Also, the way you are using your mule's foot is backwards. Most people would stamp it with the V pointing the other direction.

Hope this makes some sense, and that it helps,

Bob