Improve your leather tooling in less than 30 minutes

in this video we're gonna be looking at my top tooling tips we're going to look at tips tricks and techniques with three foundational tools here my swivel knife bevel and my Shader so for shading I use this tool that's called a vertical line thumb print it's wider on one side narrower on the other and it has those lines in there you can see that texture well that's going to come to play as we start using that tool this next tool this is a checkered bevel now this one here is you can see the checkering is that texture on the top this both of these tools all three of these tools are right out of our Deluxe beginners kit but the no matter what bevel you're using I want to find one that's nice and straight there when we're talking about your normal bevel that we're using on all of our lines now my swivel knife again this is a beginner's kit knife but we're going to be looking at things talking about the Cradle up here where our fingers going and then our swivel as we're swiveling it comes right there before we actually put tools to leather this is what's going to set you up to do nice tooling one we've taped the back of this leather now the leather that I'm tooling on here in this video this is an eight nine ounce Herman Oak veg tan leather Herman Oak being the Tannery that this comes from the eight nine ounces the thickness now before we tool on this we need to wet it down so this is called casing your leather casing your leather just means getting the moisture content right in there we have to have that good moisture content before any of these tooling techniques are going to be effective so as I'm doing this I'm covering my whole piece I'm watching how quick that water is absorbing you can still see it's real light here we haven't put any water yet so it's absorbing in there fairly quickly the more we get that laid in there the better this is yeah we're getting that moisture down into our leather all right now it's taken just a second for that absorb in there that's telling me that moisture is actually getting down in that leather not just on the surface here so when we look at our swivel knife let's start with how we're holding that knife I don't like having my finger crunch way up in there I feel like I don't have as much control over that I also don't want to be way out on the end here again lack of control I usually come right about that first knuckle just a little bit back my middle finger and my thumb are going to be down here on What's called the barrel but here we go here's this tip that a lot of people don't realize your ring finger bring that down next to your blade for added control by having that finger there it allows me to really control that blade as it goes around there and I can have my hand resting down on the leather if I'm holding up here and floating my hand I don't have the control as if I get down here and really add stability to that Blade with that ring finger when we pull that cut we don't want to have this blade flat like this we need to tip that up away from us a little bit and pull that back as we pull those cuts we want to talk depth in our cuts this is a big key right here the depth in the cuts I see people work and try to get Smooth Cuts and get a smooth line both of those are smooth lines but they don't have the same look as this one does the reason being is the depth these two cuts have consistent depth this one's very shallow and that one's pretty deep but it stops abruptly there this line here is what we're after we're looking for cuts that are going to start deep and then they're fading off light you'll hear me use that word fade a lot fading is going to give us a smooth look in our tooling and avoid a harsh tool mark when we're done with the project we don't want to be able to point and see oh we used a tool there there's a tool Mark there's a tool Mark we want it to be a smooth Even Flow so how deep do I start our cats this is hard to explain sometimes because it's kind of goes off feel the best explanation I can give you is the angle on the bottom of your blade when I push that into the leather we can start that to where that point of that angle blade is down to the top of the leather now as I pull that cut we're just going to lighten pressure off to bring that fade so lightning pressure is going to come from this top finger just relaxing a little bit these two fingers are going to be loose as they're rolling around here so we can have some movement in that Barrel once we're pulling these cats we're getting practice pulling both directions now if we have a big round cut if we're wanting to cut really steep curve here how are we going to do that we got two ways we can start by moving this leather and starting clear out at the beginning here and moving that leather around as we go so I'm going to clear a little space here on my bench I'm going to show you how I'm going to turn my hand here get that started in that line now I'm turning my knife and I'm also rotating that leather that can be a real freeing thing is to realize that you can turn your leather as you're moving your knife that's a way to get around there some projects don't allow us to turn that much though so how do we do it at that point we're going to start at the top of that curve so I'll redraw another curve here we're going to start at the top of this curve I can bring that cut around and I can go back to that curve bring it down this way now I just got that nice round cut without having to turn this whole project around even when we're doing small Cuts Like That it's okay to move that leather a little bit to allow for a smoother cut all right let's move on past our swivel knife here and talk about our bevel this bevel can cause endless amounts of frustration but we're going to break this down to a couple very simple tips that are going to smooth out your beveling and save you lots and lots of frustration okay with the problem that I see a lot of people is they try to they try to match what somebody that's further along in the craft is doing so they'll see someone beveling and hear them beveling like that and the results we're getting is a nice smooth line if you're getting started and you're trying to Bevel and you're trying to keep up that pace and you're hitting really fast but not moving evenly with your actual bevel that's where it gets to be the problem so when we're looking for that Tempo start slow starting slow is going to really help you move along and save you a ton of time going back and having to redo your bevel work because if we get choppy lines you can always go back and touch them up however it takes time and it's harder to redo than it is to do right the first time so we're just going to slow down here hit that tool let it pick up out of there and move it slightly see how when I slow down my hitting slows down but I'm moving consistently the movement of my tool is consistent with how I'm hitting with my Mall now as you get more comfortable that's going to speed up talking about fade here this line that was cut all the way it gets beveled all the way this line that was faded out when I cut it is a whole lot easier to fade out when I bevel it and that's the thing when we're building anything when we're talking about building a pattern with your tools here the better we do one step and the more efficient we get at that the easier it's going to be to do the next one that's why looking at these three tools this is going to set the foundation for smooth attractive tooling that's what we're after I'm not worried about all your detail tools yet because those can vary and really bring out a lot of differences in your tooling but getting this solid foundation is very very important now let's talk about tipping this tool we I'm going to cut a couple more lines here so we have some lines to work with I'm cutting curves because there's rarely straight lines in tooling unless we're running a border so if we have a straight border out here that's when you're going to run into straight lines within all your floral work and stuff more than likely all those lines are going to have some curves to them so no matter what we're putting in here there's going to be curves so that's what why we're looking at those lines right now all right beveling we're keeping that bevel straight up and down if I get to tipping this bevel and have it tipped off to the side too much even hitting consistently and moving slowly you're still going to get those choppy lines and even when you've heard keep it straight up and down and you understand to keep that straight up and down I find that people will get to tipping that as they're going when I'm watching them tool they'll be tooling down a longer line like this see what I just did with that bevel I never moved my hand I started out kind of smooth and then as we went it got choppier and choppier the reason being is I never move my hand so when we're looking at eliminating some of that choppiness remember to walk your hand down there I'm going a little bit at a time but now I need to reset my hands so I can pull that back just like our swivel knife we talk about that ring finger that ring finger is going to come into play here as we're beveling and running this tool too but that Pinky and that hand is anchored down here given some stability to my tool so I'm not wandering around with that if I'm trying to Tool and just hold my whole hand up here and we're hitting this down it's it's hard things are hard to track in there right it's easy to get off that line all right now I notice my leather's starting to get a little curved to it here but I'm just gonna grab that kind of manhandle that a little bit and get that thing flatten back out now we're getting back flat again that curling is just coming from moisture and wet getting wet and drying down there the back of that is being is being taped it's holding the back of that and so as that water's wet and trying to expand it's or that leather is trying to expand it's kind of moving that direction so we got to just flatten that out a little bit so we're keeping that flat on the marble okay looking at keeping that smooth again anchoring those fingers and moving your hand as necessary re-anchoring even if we think we're doing something right and think we know like oh we know don't don't tip that bevel well that's again if I start moving away and I don't reposition my hand as I'm going getting things tipped or I'll start reaching this way with it but not moving so reposition so you can keep that up and down now here's a little bit of a I don't know I'd say I wouldn't say next level trick because this is one I had to learn right off the bat I didn't have a chance to have a lot of different bevels in my in my tool collection when I started so I had to get by with one that was about this size kind of a good medium size but when you get into smaller areas it's harder to get that even so when I look on the inside of this curve if I'm going to be beveling around here you don't want to chew up some of that leather that curves kind of big enough where it's not too bad I'm going to make some smaller curves to really show you here so let's make a couple of these all right so now if I'm trying to get around this curve see how that's starting to chew up leather on the outside that we don't want to have happen we want to get a nice smooth cut there so as I'm babbling around here my option is size down in bevels if you get smaller bevel then it's easier to fit in a tighter curve right because if this curve is coming around really tight then a wide bevel is going to wind up Crossing those lines right a smaller bevel we could reach inside there with I like this tighter curve here like this I'm going to go ahead and cut that little guy in there we're going to cut another one that little too really show you what I'm talking about so this one here keeping that bevel flat it's not doing it we're covering up all sorts of stuff we don't want to cut into there but what's that option if you don't have the smaller bevel or if you're looking to increase efficiency meaning being able to Tool faster and get through projects without having to reach back to your block and switch tools as much let's take this wide bevel and make it a narrow one by simply tipping this bevel like I told you not to do over on these bigger Longer lines we can actually make a shorter bevel out of it in these tighter spots so to get around this curve here I can tip this bevel being careful because we're not wanting to create the big divots in there by heading them at an angle but I can tip that shortening the face of that tool and working to get around there so even a tight little curve like this we can use that big wide bevel tip it up and work our way around there all right we're going to move on to our shading because once we've cut nice smooth lines and then we've created good even beveling in there fading out following our cut lines and faded out those bevel lines now it comes to shading this tool here my go-to tool for shaving that vertical line thumbprint we talked about is a great tool but I don't want to hit it down flat all the way this is a tool I don't want to see that full impression of it's one that's easy to look back at the end of your tooling and say wow there's a tool Mark you used it there there and there we don't want to do that we want to get it smoother so I'm always going to be tipping this tool okay we're going to tip this tool either up One Direction two aside and most likely both so when I just tip this up like this and hit that tool now we got a lot more depth on this end we got that nice sharp line like we want we're going to show you that in a second but this end Fades off so you can't really see where that tool ends it just Fades out of there I can even flatten that out a little bit and fade it further as long as we don't get down and hit this back point in there we can continue that line out there now also going to look at tipping to the side so I can tip out and to the side hit that and now we're hitting more just this corner doing that same thing but a little more gradual just like we did here with that line now we can see where we're getting that this is faded back here it's also fading off to the side and a softening that line so this one has a hard line all the way around it we're going to soften those lines by tipping that tool now when we do that where is this going to come into play well we look at these Vines that stick out they come out off of our tooling Vine there offer that main branch now I can tip this tool and tip it this way start walking this down just like a bevel we can walk back up into there now we've faded off down this way we've faded off that way created a nice little hard Ridge right here on that rounded point of that and brought some pop and depth to our tooling but faded this out and left it smooth looking big difference in that I see people they go to put that in there and they think okay we got to tip that we've got to fade that off so they'll really tip that and try to fade that but it still has that hard Ridge on the back side where that tool stops and so they get frustrated and try to really fade it off there but it can create even more of a hard line on the back so even though we're lifting it up lightening that just a little bit and flattening that out as you pull it back we're going to get that nice smooth transition there so when we look at areas like these here we got a sticker Vine out that way pull that back like it's coming off of Vine work coming up here and this one branches out or we'll look at flower petal here as well we'll have a petal like that let's even do a rounded petal there as well I'm not going to Bevel these because I want all the attention on this shading right here I'm going to turn this leather so we can see the rounded portion of this sticker Vine tipping that tool up and tipping it in a little bit because I want the hard line to come in and create this highlighted Ridge right where that curve is in here you can see I'm barely moving this along but I'm moving it each time I hit that tool and being consistent with my movements and now I flatten that tool as we cut roll around here and start to soften that back line and fade it down our Vine work rotating that tool as I'm hitting it and moving it is the big key here this is the one I see people they have a tougher time mastering this once they do a light bulb clicks and it's like oh yes now I get it now I can run that tool I'm getting the smooth lines I want simply by learning as we fade that to flatten it out and start pulling that back nice smooth transition no hard breaking that line on the back side only up here on the curve of that where we want to bring that highlighted Ridge and bring that pop there now we want to make sure that Ridge is up tight to that curve too if we're too far down it's not going to look right either if we look here being so far off there doesn't give you that smooth look as when we run it up close now let's look at these pedals when I'm running this tool same thing looking at that outside curve fading this off in here so now he's able to fade that highlighted Ridge even and fade that down starting it deep out here rolling that tool I faded this whole Shadow line back into here and then faded that Ridge right off into nothing as well now I'm going to come around this point bring that curve around here and fade it off up to that point now we've added a whole bunch of depth to this pedal just by two little shading spots there and we're pulling those and fading them back down towards where our flower center would be show you the same thing around this one this rounded petal here we're going to have that Ridge be deep up here around the top of that curve and then we'll fade it down on both sides here so I'm going to start here now whether using the wide end or the narrow end just depends on which one fits better and what you're doing we get into a narrower sticker Vine like this I'll turn and use my narrow end getting into a bigger round petal here I'll use that wider end so we're going to get this out here starting that beep out here on the end now I'm going to flatten and rotate the face of that thumbprint as it rolls around that corner do the same thing up off of this top one here rotate and flatten that as we work our way down now we've added depth in there again created more to those petals so we can come back take advantage of this blank space in the middle again that shading we need to have a difference in our depths if we just Mash down that Shader all the way through there we've taken everything down a dimension instead of adding that variation in here the smooth leather we're going to take advantage of that with our swivel knife and now I can pull some of those decorative Cuts in there bring that to life foreign there we go just these three tools alone can transform your tooling taking the time to master these three tools will take you from a really basic beginner level up to an elevated professional level in a hurry don't worry so much about your details look at the foundation of your tooling we get better at running that knife the easier it's going to be to run your bevel the smoother we're on that bevel the smoother these outside lines are the better we're going to have following that shading all three of these tools we need to get control over being able to bring the depth and the fade to all of our tooling and it's really going to take you up to the next level don't skip the steps of mastering these three tools

Channel: Joe Meling

Views: 116,398

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Id: EBoPKjM7Pno

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023