22/11/2009 by Paul Carpenter.

I guess there is alot of people getting all excited about the release of the new AC2 and probably for some good reasons!!!

Our kids have been looking forward to its release for months and as with other similar fads they have had over the years we had to paint them on their walls, including the new assassin. Not quite as detailed as the real thing (atleast real on a computer screen) but it made them happy for a 5 minutes.

The first wall paintings we did were of bugs life, dinasaurs, disney, thomas the train, sonic - the list is endless. Below are a few of the results, not great to start with but I think they have improved over the years;

For all those who do have kids and the new AS2, good luck!!!!!!

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08/11/2009 by Paul Carpenter.

Finally got round to writing the leather armour PDF. I have not really written alot in thuis one, depending more on the numerous photos to portray my methods and it really is’nt a beginners project more for the semi experianced leather craftsman because as stated above I have not included alot of explaination.

Saying that tho, depending on how visually aware you are, a beginner might get alot out of it but I would advise looking at my other tutorials about carving and the steel knives as I don’t cover that in this tutorial.

Leather Armour tutorial

Just completed this fictitious ad print for the armour while playing around photoshop, and saved it as a PDF - might get a laugh out of it if you have my sense of humour!!!!

black armor advert

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06/11/2009 by Paul Carpenter.

Apologies, since starting back to school have had little time for posting or even making any leather stuff, so thought I would talk alittle about some past pictorial leather carving.

Have been carving leather for about 5 years now, started off easy with some Al Stohlman designs and then progressed to other projects as dictated by past customers, family and friends. Most of the carving was based around the A4 size which is good practise for saddles, books etc as shown above but as my skills got better, so did my carvings.

from the start I only used the contours created by the carving to give my pictures that 2D look but after 2 years or so started to push the leather in from the back to help improve the look of various subjects giving them more of a rounded feel such as the horse in the plain Indian scene at the top. It also help improve my portrait subjects.

Only did a few portraits but I do not apologise for using the great John Wayne as my favourite subject - I used the pushing out of the leather from the back method on both these carvings of him and they did improve their feel, look and texture, especially the poster size one which otherwise would of had alot of flat surface on it.

Probably seems strange to mix the old with the new, but I include the bike carving because apart from the pack horse carving above (A5 size) this bike carving is probably the most technical I have done mostly due the small area I was trying to carve alot of detail into.

The last big project I did was the shield for Robert Low and that was about a year ago - I think if I tried to do some of the carvings above again they would not turn out so well - like everything it is practise, practise.

Paul

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