How to Use Knives in Leather Working

Video Transcript

"Okay, so the first step, usually in leather carving is to basically cut your design, using a knife. There's a couple different kinds of knives we'll look at. I'm holding the sort of straight craft knife right now, but there's also the swivel knife which is this one here and I've got some different tips for it. But the basic approach is to kind of cut your design using the knife so you actually have cuts in the leather that kind of define the main lines of the design. Then you use combinations of beveling and shading and backgrounding and other ways of texturizing and providing detail, to basically go from just a design that's cut into the leather, to now it becomes more of a three dimensional relief design, something like this, okay. So I want to talk a little bit about knives. So, here's the, here's kind of like a, like I say, the straight knife craft knife. It is double edged right, so it's slanted on both sides. Something like this you really want to use it kind of, really straight up and down and always kind of draw it towards yourself, it's a lot kind of, easier to control it if you're kind of bringing the knife towards yourself. The craft knife is really good for making straight cuts, so just, kind of like this, giving medium pressure. Now there's a cut in that leather, it didn't go all the way through, it just kind of basically, oh, partly goes in about thirty percent or maybe fifty percent if it's really sharp. But then what you would do now, is you can now bevel one side of that and leave the other side untouched which will then give it sort of a 3D look to it. You could also use the straight knife to do, maybe kind of simple curves if you've got a good wrist, if you're really good at maybe twisting and turning. You can already see, if I want to do, oops, see, I've already lost the knife. If you want to do kind of more complex twists and turns, it's really kind of hard to do it with the straight knife. The straight knife is really better for doing straight lines and maybe little, tiny cuts like this. This is where the swivel knife comes in. Remember the swivel knife kind of swivels, kind of three sixty degrees like this and you can kind of place your finger here and because of the virtue of how it's built and how it rotates, you can, as you're cutting, you can be rotating the knife around and you can get a lot more kind of control over cutting sort of nice curves like this. So, in the next couple of clips, we'll learn how to use the knives more properly."