Leather Carving

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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