Native American Portrait with Jan Schoonover

Jan and I just finished up the latest project in the Sculptured Leather Art Lesson Series. Lesson #6 will be a Native American portrait. Jan decided that this picture looks really nice with the natural leather color, so there will be no coloring on this one. Jan's turned out really nice, as usual. I think mine would have turned out better if I'd have had a little more time to work on the detail. While we were waiting for putty to dry, Jan went over the the things he teaches in a hairing class. Tomorrow before I head back for home we're going to go over the steps for creating several different types of horns and antlers. The hair and horns lesson is one of the classes scheduled for the Dimensions in Leather conference coming up in Australia in July.

Mountain Lion lesson now available

Lesson #4 in the Sculptured Leather Art Lesson Series with Jan Schoonover is now available for purchase from  the Badlands Leather Art website. In this lesson, Jan teaches all the steps to make a realistic,  3 dimensional portrait of a mountain lion. This ended up being the longest lesson so far but I didn't want to leave anything out. There are several   techniques used to create the different lengths of hair on the lion along with embossing, coloring, and finally, how to add whiskers.

I'll get to work on the next lesson (an eagle) soon and try to have it out before the end of the year.

Another partnership project

This project began when I saw a pattern in the Great Book of Tattoo Designs by Lora S. Irish. She has a buffalo pattern in the book and the way it was drawn, the hair on the buffalo reminded me of feathers. I liked the idea, so I decided to go ahead and carve a buffalo with feathers instead of hair. The first picture I did was painted and framed and made it's way to a couple of  leather shows. The judges at the first show it went to commented that the hair on the buffalo looked more like feathers. Um...... that's what I was going for!



When I finished the carving, I had a request to show how I did it, so I carved another one and wrote it up as a lesson on Leatherworker.net. I decided instead of finishing the second one myself, it might be fun to get some other people involved in the project. One of my friends suggested that adding some buffalo flying might show that I really did intend for the hair to look like feathers. I asked Kathy Flanagan if she would like to add to the background of my carving and she agreed to give it a try. She carved a buffalo calf laying in  a nest (where else would a winged baby buffalo hang out?) and a small buffalo flying in the background.

After she returned the picture to me, I asked Clay Miller if he would like to add something to the project. He agreed, and drew up a Sheridan style corner pattern and carved it. Thanks Kathy and Clay for playing along. I think projects like this are pretty fun. So this is where the project stands now. The next step is to see if I can find someone interested in coloring it cuz I don't want to attempt it myself. If it gets finished in time, I'm thinking of offering for the raffle at the IFOLG show next fall in Albuquerque, NM.

Lesson #5, will be a bald eagle

November is going to be a busy month. Deer season will take up the first three weekends, then our oldest son Dusty will be coming home for Thanksgiving. That won't leave any time for me to go to Billings so I went this past weekend to get started on the next lesson (even though I'm only half through with lesson #4). Jan decided to do a bald eagle for the next lesson. He did his first eagle back in 1996 before he had taken a class with Robb Barr. His first eagle was done with the plug embossing method that Al Stohlman taught. After Jan learned about leather dust and cutting the leather loose from the background, he could get a lot more 3-D effect. This lesson will teach how Jan creates feather texture along with embossing and coloring the eagle. Here's a photo of the eagle picture I created with Jan this weekend. There is still a little touch up work that needs to be done and a few things I'd do different on the next one, but I was really happy with the way it turned out.

Hot snot on a silver platter

"One minute you're hot snot on a  silver platter, the next minute you're a cold booger on a paper plate."

My son Jake made that comment in a conversation last weekend with Stacy and I.

The  International Federation of Leather Guilds  held their 44th annual show last weekend in St Louis, MO. I didn't get to go to the show this year. I have only had the chance to go to one of these shows, Denver in 2005. I've been sending pieces to the show each year since. This year I entered the grizzly bear picture that Jan taught me how to do last spring and the bugling elk that Kathy Flanagan and I did as a partnership project. Both of these projects took first place ribbons at the show and the bear also took a ribbon for best of category. After the show was over, my friend Kate Dubiel posted a message on Facebook saying "this week you're hot snot".  Well if I was "hot snot" this week, I was in good company!  Kate took a first place with her game board at the show. Kathy took a couple more ribbons in the masters class. Several other friends also took ribbons at the show. Paul and Rosa Zalesak of Leather Wranglers posted  a bunch of pictures on Facebook from the show. Stacy and I are planning on being at the show next year in Albuquerque, NM.

Congratulations to everyone who was "hot snot" this week!

Brown Trout lesson is now available

I wanted to let everyone here know that lesson #3 in the Sculptured Leather Art lesson series with Jan Schoonover is now available from the Badlands Leather Art website. This lesson is a little different than the first two. Instead of hairing techniques, this one will teach you how to create scales and fins. As in all the lessons in this series, each step will have complete  instructions along with color photos to guide you from start to finish. 

I've begun working on lesson #4 but haven't gotten very far yet. As I mentioned in a previous post, the next lesson will be a mountain lion. I'll try and have it finished by the middle of November. 

A busy week off

I had a week off of work, so I spent it catching up on some leather projects. First off, I spent 3 days in Billings with Jan working on lesson #4 in our series of extreme embossed projects. This lesson will cover carving, embossing and coloring a mountain lion. We had hoped that by taking 3 days to do this one, the pace would be a little easier. As it turned out, we ended up working till 9 Thursday and Friday and till 5 on Saturday. We had a little problem with our embossing putty the first day. We had heard that all the boot and saddlemakers were starting to switch over to Petronio's brand rubber cement because of it's strength and fast drying properties. We found out that when it's mixed with leather dust to make putty, it does dry very quickly on the surface, but once it forms a scab on top, it doesn't dry underneath. We waited 2 hours and the putty hadn't even started to dry in the middle. We ended up scraping all the putty out and mixing up a new batch using Barge brand rubber cement. Even with the set back, we ended up finishing up the project on schedule on Saturday.

I spent most of Sunday and Monday finishing up a pair of chinks that my son Jake took an order for. If we're going to do more of these, we really need to get  a sewing machine that works for more than punching holes. It was my first time sewing an inlay into anything and my first time cutting fringe. Overall though, we were pretty happy with how they turned out. Good thing because we both have chaps started for ourselves that need to get finished up one of these days.

And finally, today I finished up the Brown trout lesson, #3 in the series. I'll send it off to Jan in the morning to let him check it out and see if there are any changes he wants made. Then as soon as I hear back from him, I'll get it to Kate and have her put it up on the website and make it available to those of you that have been waiting. Tomorrow it's back to work at my real job.