Coming soon!

Back in the middle of April, I went to Billings and took a class with Jan Schoonover on how to create an embossed pronghorn antelope. I had taken this same class a few years ago, but this time we had an agenda. Jan and I are going to put together a series of lessons geared at teaching the techniques he has developed over the years to create his extreme embossed leather pictures.

Since taking that class, I have been working at writing up the first lesson in the series. For some reason, I was having some trouble getting started on this one. Last weekend I decided to try it the way I've written lessons in the past. I started carving a new antelope project and just wrote as I was going. It didn't take long to get into the swing of it, and I got past the writers block I was having. Thursday it rained and snowed all day and Friday it snowed on and off, so I had both days off from work. I spent then both days working on the lesson, and it's just about finished. It just needs a little more proof reading by new eyes to pick out any errors I might have made. I printed out a copy of what it looks like right now and mailed it to Jan. He wanted to have a copy to show people in his booth in Sheridan in a couple weeks. Our plans right now are to make these lessons available as PDF files downloadable off the internet. To keep the cost down, we'd like to not have to print them out, but I haven't ruled that out completely yet. As soon as we get things set up on my website to start selling the lessons, I'll make an announcement. Hopefully it wont be too far in the future. Once we get things going, we'd like to be able to offer a new lesson every 6-8 weeks. It'll mean a lot of trips to Billings for me in the next couple of years, but it's a project I'm really excited to be part of.

Each lesson will contain fully illustrated instructions for completing a new project. The first lesson has 32 pages of instructions that cover the tooling, hairing, embossing and coloring processes, including over 120 color photographs. Hopefully I didn't leave anything out :o)