Tooling Your Leather Work

Video Transcript

"Ok , well a lot of us who went to camp, summer camp, boys scout camp, girls scout camp, probably did some type of leather tooling of one kind of another. And usually what you learn at camp is just to do basic tooling with a tool that that already has kind of a design in the tool itself. So for example, oh here's one here, this is a stainless steel tool and it kind of has a picture of a little design of like some leaves at the tip of it. And so kind of one of the simplest things you can do is to just, on a piece of cased leather, leather that's been made wet, to just kind of place the tool down and strike it really hard with a hammer and then you get various designs, kind of like these you see here. I mean here's some letters here and like a little butterfly, some flowers, some stars. Here some smaller letters, ok here I've spelled out the word "winter" I don't know if you can see that with some other letters. And so there's a lot of fun you can have with that but kind of more of them, I guess, traditional art of leather carving is kind of goes in a different direction. Where you actually pick a design that you're interested in doing and you actually bring it out of the leather as if you're a sculptor. So, you see a couple of examples here so I've kind of started doing a leaf here and you see there's a lot of dimensional relief here kind of within the veins, the leaf itself kind of pops out from the leather there's some kind of texture here. This is just another kind of little small example I did here with a kind of a Mexican like Day of the Dead skeleton. You can see there's some kind of three dimensional aspects there, so this is kind of a different kind of a technique so when we talk about leather carving we're really talking about how to kind of bring these, like a three dimensional textured image out of leather like these examples here."