How to Achieve Different Cuts in Leather Working

Video Transcript

"Okay, so remember that the purpose of the knife is to cut your design into the leather first and then to use your tools like your bevelers, and your shaders and your camouflage stamps and things like this to basically provide the relief so you get this 3D effect, okay? So the fact that you made cuts to begin with is what allows you to achieve this relief. So for, in an example like this, most of this design was initially cut out using a knife and then the 3D aspect of it, the relief, was gotten by using the different tools on one side of the cuts or the other, okay? Okay, so this is a design I first cut in with a knife and as you can see, I already started beveling kind of the edge here. Remember, that the way a beveler works is a double action tool, so when your leather is cased out, you place the toe of that beveler kind of right there, kind of up against the cut and, you actually place it inside the cut and kind of, as you allow that tool to travel with your little taps, you see what's happening is now I have given a 3D structure to that cut. So that's kind of the very, very basic technique to getting your first 3D structure combining sort of a cutting and beveling. But then another thing you can use cuts for is, let's say I, let's say I'm finished beveling this out and I'm all done, let's say I just want to do some little decorative cuts at the end. That's another thing the knives are used for. So, let's say I was happy with kind of the way this leaf looked and I just wanted to kind of have at the end, just some kind of little sort of decorative kind of cuts here. Maybe I kind of want my leaf to be sort of be finished that way. That's sort of a secondary use for a knife to just kind of do little decorative small cuts like that at the end and then you wouldn't bevel them any further. But mostly what the knife is used for again, is making your initial pattern that's then, you use the bevelers or the shaders to kind of give it that 3D structure."