Avoid Over Casing Your Leather Work

Video Transcript

"But you want to be careful and make sure that you don't case the leather to much. That you don't put to much moisture on it because what can happen then is the leather can get really mushy and even though it might take it take an impression it might not retain alot of the detail. So, this leather here I've really kind of gotten it pretty wet here on this side. You can see there's actually still kind of moisture up on top and let's see what happens when I strike it with the mallot here. Is, well ok it made an impression kind of all right there. It really kind of mashed it down maybe more than I wanted to. You can see you kind of really kind of made a quite a dent in the leather here but it will become alot more of a problem when you start using tools to kind of get more of the three dimensional look out of it. So, for example, if I start trying to depress kind of areas of the leather like this, the more and more you work with it, if it's to wet you can get sort of a really mushy and has more of almost like a clay like consistancy rather than one of leather. And so you really have to kind of practice to get that happy medium of having the right amount of moisture in the leather."