How to Use the Backgrounder Tool in Leather Working

Video Transcript

"Ok, so remember some of these single action tools we've talked about. What you do is you get a texture over a larger area by overlapping the impressions. So, here's an example from the camouflage stamp where impressions were overlapped. This is straight up and down, remember, and this is kind of at an angle. Here's kind of overlapped impressions from the vainer. There's another tool called the background tool. This is it right here. It kind of has a teardrop shaped head with kind of a mottled cross-hatching surface to it. And what this is used for is for kind of making very large areas that are darker and sort of texturized with kind of a mottled, kind of a stippled texture pattern. So I've started doing it a little bit here. And the way you do it is just by making an impression with a single strike, but then now rotate the tool to some other orientation...it kind of doesn't matter. And you just kind of do little, overlapping impressions...one on top of the other by rotating tool a little bit between each one and you just keep kind of going over a large area like this. And if you keep it up, you can see it's starting to develop this nice little darkened, texturized, mottled area that's a little bit depressed down into the leather. And you can do that over large areas and get kind of a really nice, again, change in color and depth and texture by doing that. So, that's the backgrounder tool. And you usually do it in overlapping strokes like that at different angles."