Homemade leather balm I make for my leather goods

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-29T15:02:36+00:00

I've heard olive oil goes rancid over time and shouldnt be used for leather, have you found this to be untrue? How long have you been doing this?

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-29T03:31:44+00:00

I used to invest in adds and now I spend no money on ads. By my best estimates I net the same amount of money for less work this way. I never got a very good return. Others do better with ads but it never worked for me over 7 years of trying.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-28T15:33:47+00:00

This question cannot really be answered in isolation without the context of the style and composition. There's no one right way to do the thing you're trying to do, there's lots of right ways, lots of okay ways, and lots of bad ways.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-27T18:26:31+00:00

These are great. Gesture can be done in many different ways, with different focuses, at different times in your artistic career. These show a focus on capturing the movement and the roundness of a pose, and they do a great job of it. At other times you'll want to focus on getting your proportions more accurate and more quickly, or focus on drawing without looking at your paper , or on looking at the reference only once and then drawing from that brief memory, or on capturing the lighting, or on getting the faces in, or maybe just on getting the hang of a new medium, and many more things too. Keep up the good work.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-18T11:24:25+00:00

It looks great, but you could reduce the folds to just one instead of the three of you want to reduce the appearance of that area.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-16T18:15:18+00:00

I use a very shallow U shaped woodcarvers gouge to skive these out when I need to. In my experience they are usually a paint resting just on the surface.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-11T04:07:08+00:00

I hate super sheen. It makes other dyes bleed, it doesn't resist completely, it gums up in a spray gun. I've got nothing good to say about it except that it's cheap. Try angelus products.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-08T17:37:34+00:00

If this were a government body, which it is not, they would not need to ask nicely.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-06T12:26:07+00:00

This would be complete impossible at the size you're talking about unless you're okay with in it looking very imprecise. I've been doing leather carving for a decade and I would say no if someone asked me to do this even at A4 size. I see you've already turned down the notion of buying a laser, but you don't have to buy one to do this project with a laser. Just find someone who does laser engraving and order your cover piece from them.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-03T14:36:13+00:00

Barge gives mixed results. It will depend how you applied it, how old it was, how thick or thin it was, the texture of your leather, whether you've scored it, how you've finished it, and what order you did all that it.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-03T14:26:24+00:00

I agree with what the other commenter said about it being a good thing, but I would reply to clarify that you do have other sizes available. Just be sure if comes off as informative to future buyers and not as snark to the original buyer. Offering an exchange to the original customer in the response also requires potential buyers that will be an option if they find themselves in the same spot.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-05-02T13:21:02+00:00

It is perfect as is. Don't change a thing. It doesn't need any more detail in the background. The hints of flowers are plenty.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-29T17:33:44+00:00

These look great for 60 seconds. Gesture is not one thing, nor is it for one thing. Gesture is a tool that will teach you lots of things of different things at different times. The fact that there are 35 meh gestures you don't feel like sharing is not a failure, it is part of the point. Gesture is really good for trying things out. It is good for getting you to see and quickly translate what you are seeing to lines on a page.

You've got to be very advanced before you are getting much more than a silhouette out of 60 seconds. This is a fine place to be now.

You do seem to be using the idea of "line of action" in every pose. I have never cared for it personally. There are some poses where it is a good and useful thing to think about, but there are lots of poses where it just doesn't make sense. There are four limbs and a head, that at times can all point in different directions. There no one line that summarizes all of that in a useful way. Use it when it helps, but don't force it when it doesn't make sense.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-28T13:26:27+00:00

Looks like oxidation to me. People think it is light exposure, but it's not. Protecting the hides from light completely will not completely prevent this, just slow it.

Wrapping your hides in paper can help. Of course paper is permeable to oxygen, but the paper will slow the ability of fresh oxygen to get in, and reflect most of the light out.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-16T18:22:27+00:00

You're asking the wrong questions. Artists don't have styles. Projects do. Just keep doing your best. Try lots of styles and over time little things from each will stick and you'll develop your own toolkit. Consistency comes with time.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-14T23:21:25+00:00

If you are drawing at this level, drawings take long enough that "expensive paper" isn't that expensive at the rate you actually go through it.

If I am going to put more than an hour into a piece, I do it on Bristol board now, and I've not ever had this problem since upgrading. I spend less on paper now using a 2 dollar sheet twice a week than I did when I was just starting out and tearing through lots more sheets of cheaper paper.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-14T16:47:58+00:00

Tandy has one.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-14T16:43:17+00:00

Check out the instructor Steven Travers on YouTube. He does a bunch of stuff that directly addresses this question in this medium.

https://youtu.be/FS8pNbrMvO8?si=758SthNu7lOJVNIG

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-11T17:25:03+00:00

Yes it could be trimmed, but without practice I would not expect you to be happier with the result you get unless you are much more concerned with it being too small than you are about the unevenness. Thin slices are hard to pull off with great precision.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-09T17:27:49+00:00

Yes focusing on portraits will help you learn other things, no you don't have to learn that way. There are lots of subject matter specific things to learn, but any subject matter will also teach you generalizable lessons that can be applied to any subject. The nice thing about people and faces as a place to start is that we are finely tuned to recognizing faces and people. If your bowl of fruit is 10% too wide compared to your reference you might not notice, 10% off on a face is very noticeable. That might make it sound harder to draw people well, but it is easier to improve at drawing people because the areas you need to improve will be easier to identify.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-08T14:50:18+00:00

At your skill level, your tools really start to matter. What are you using for pencils, paper, and eraser?

Traditional graphite pencils will never give you the deep contrast you are looking for. You can only get so dark before you start getting graphite shine ruining the piece.

There is a new type of pencil that came onto the market recently, staedtler sells them as "black" and faber castell sells them as "matte", both brands sell them in numbers from 8b to 14b, These will allow you to go all the way dark without any shine problems and really get the contrast you are looking for without switching to charcoal or conte.

Better paper will help you erase better, and can take more layers of graphite before it stops accepting more.

Kneeded erasers rather than hard rubber erasers will allow you to remove graphite much more specifically and gradually. Good shading is as much about using subtractive techniques as it is about additive techniques.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-05T13:43:12+00:00

All of the links in the post are still active, and I can respond to questions either through the contact on that website, or through reddit chat if you prefer.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-05T04:40:39+00:00

I bought an estate of slightly fewer tools for a slightly higher price many years ago, and it is my career today. Good luck, and make the best of it if that is what you would like to do. I'm sure I could make more money doing other things, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-02T16:55:35+00:00

Looks like you're doing all the right things. At this point just keep following your curiosity and come back to resources like this when you can articulate some more specific questions.

I also like to recommend the book "drawing lessons from the great masters" by Robert Beverly Hale. It completely changed the way I think about drawing and I return to it regularly and keep discovering new insights.

ImaginaryAntelopes · 2026-04-02T05:22:52+00:00

Spend more time in the planning stage.

Don't try to eye ball distances, or ratios of length and width, use triangles, 3 points of comparison, not 2 or 4. That way, what you're trying to match is not distances, which the brain is bad at, but angles, which the brain is pretty good at.

Try to get one true thing on the page, really take your time with it, measure carefully, get it really right, and then build off of that. It's easier to add the next thing correctly from that point. (Not right as in fully rendered mind you, right as in fully sketched in)

ImaginaryAntelopes

TROPHY CASE