painting leather

kaiÃ¶ · Post by **kaiÃ¶** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:42 pm

I wanna do some carving, and make it look good. Red on black to be precise. Can I just get red dye and dip my paintbrush in there or do I have to get acrylic paints?

When would be a good time to paint it, before or after hardening (baking)?

audax · Post by **audax** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:46 pm

Yes, to all the above. You can brush dye it or paint it, you can do it before or after you bake.

If you want to brush dye it, invest in some blocking solution to prevent the dyes from blending together.

Whatver coloring you add do it before adding any wax or other sealer. Can't paint ot dye over wax.

kaiÃ¶ · Post by **kaiÃ¶** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:21 pm

Can I buy blocking solution at Tandy's? How do I use it, paint it on the border of the dyes?

audax · Post by **audax** » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:31 pm

kaiÃ¶ wrote:Can I buy blocking solution at Tandy's? How do I use it, paint it on the border of the dyes?

Yeah, Tandy's has it.

Hyah:

http://www.tandyleatherfactory.com/home ... Product_12

Instructions for use are at the bottom of the description.

Konstantin the Red · Post by **Konstantin the Red** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 12:57 am

I have overdyed black-dyed then tooled work with an application of red and the cut edges of the swivel knife work picked up the red for a subtle enhancement. Edge groover's lines also picked up the red.

Leather paints are all waterbased acrylics anyway. These pigments will lie upon the surface of the leather rather than sinking in the way dyes do. Using these contrasting properties to best effect can make an excellent piece.

kaiÃ¶ · Post by **kaiÃ¶** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 1:29 am

Konstantin the Red wrote:I have overdyed black-dyed then tooled work with an application of red and the cut edges of the swivel knife work picked up the red for a subtle enhancement. Edge groover's lines also picked up the red.

I have no idea of what you just said.

Konstantin the Red · Post by **Konstantin the Red** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 4:22 pm

The piece was first black and plain, a broad heavy belt made of vegetable tanned. Then I got ambitious and tooled it in a strapwork pattern, black dye and all. When I was done, there were a lot of leather-colored edges to be seen in the tooling; leather stamped down left other parts of the surface still standing high, with an exposed edge. The black dye had not penetrated very far beyond the leather's grain surface. Now the piece looked trashed. What to do? I took out my bottle of red dye and went over all the tooling with a dye applicator -- overdyeing, you see. Hmmm... that looks pretty cool. Subtle.

Part of the tooling design was putting in borders made with an edge groover (another one of those near-eternal tools-to-buy -- there are a couple of basic types of groovers and this is one). It traces along the edge of a leather piece, and an adjustable cutter makes a small groove parallelling the edge at whichever distance is desired from about 1/8 to about 3/4 inch. Not only is this decorative, the groove is a good place to stitch through. With the thread sunk "below grade" as it were, sewing is very neat and the thread well protected from wear. In my particular belt, the edge grooves were just for decoration, and with the red dye visible in them, they were decorative indeed, in a pinstriping sort of effect.

Clear as mud? Covers the ground? [/Harry Belafonte pun]

losthelm · Post by **losthelm** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 7:58 pm

If your frusterated with the available color pallet try copic markers.

http://www.copicmarkers.com/
plug for this paticular dealer because they are SCA.

They are alcohol based and work well for all kinds of stuff.

Konstantin post a pic.

Konstantin the Red · Post by **Konstantin the Red** » Tue Sep 22, 2009 1:33 am

May be a while -- I haven't a digital camera and my scanner isn't hooked up to anything right now with a new(ish) computer tower we got a deal on and an old if low-mileage scanner... you know what mixing generations of equipment can get like. Just getting them plugged into one another is a minor triumph and then you need to ensure you can get them on speaking terms. (Now we're running Firefox Ubuntu instead of Win98... bollocks to you, malware script-kiddies!!)

The effect on sufficiently dense tooling like allover Celtic knotwork is a little like colorshot fabric; the contrasting brighter color is more obvious from some angles than others.

Use the method above if you'd like to experiment. A good indicator that it will succeed is if your dark dye has indeed not penetrated far into the leather and your tooling shows all these scraps of leather color on your defined edges. Looks really skanky until you over-dye.

Another good indicator is an experimental pass with an edge groover to see if the bottom of the groove you dig comes up pale, not dyed.