I’m new to leather work and involved in a big, and for me, challenging project. I was looking for a way to transfer artwork so I could practice carving but accidentally stumbled on this. I hit on this as a way to emboss leather. I quickly found out that this is not an original idea but I was amazed how well it works. I CADed artwork I have permission to use and 3D printed a negative as an embossing plate. I used a scrap piece of leather, embossed, stained and gold painted the image. This was my first test piece. It’s not perfect but good for my purposes and I thought I’d share the results just in case someone could benefit from this.
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That’s cool! To avoid the layer lines from showing up on your finished piece, you can use an iron and smooth them out on the printed original. As long as you stay below the print temperature, it won’t turn to liquid but you can smooth away all the layer lines and create a shiny surface.
Thanks for that tip. I thought about using a smoothing product or sanding, but I’m a bit conflicted. The lines could be mistaken for tooling as long as you don’t look too close. You’ve given me a new idea, maybe I can deliberately include a tooling style pattern to cover for that. In any event, it looks a LOT better than me trying to apply my carving skills!
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