Hand-Tooled Leather Relief from a Reference Photo

Format

Text

Inputs

Reference_photo (image) · Required

Outputs

Finished_leather_panel_photo (image)

Turn the attached photo into one picture carved and stamped by hand into a piece of vegetable-tanned leather, and photograph that finished piece as a physical object. Use a vertical 4:5 frame. Output one single vertical image, with no grid and no before-and-after pair.

THE PIECE
One flat panel of natural vegetable-tanned leather, about the size of a postcard, lies face up on a scarred wooden bench under soft daylight from one side. The picture covers the whole face of the panel. The leather is thick enough that its cut edge reads clearly all the way around; that edge is beveled, slicked, and burnished to a darker, glassy brown. A short contact shadow sits under the panel. The panel lies slightly off-square to the frame, and one corner curls up a little, the way a wet-formed piece dries. Nothing else is in the frame.

HOW THE PICTURE IS MADE
Every shape begins as a cut. A swivel knife has been drawn through the damp leather along the outline of each shape, leaving a V-groove that opens as it is pulled and closes where it ends. Show where one cut overruns another.
Beside each cut, the leather is driven down with a beveling stamp, so one side of the line drops away and the other side stands up. This step, not a drawn line, is what separates one shape from the next. The depressed side keeps the half-moon tracks of the stamp, struck one overlapping the last.
The ground around and behind the subject is knocked right down and covered edge to edge with a pebbling stamp: a dense field of small round dimples that darkens the leather and pushes the subject forward.
Colour is translucent spirit dye rubbed in with a wool dauber. The leather's own grain, pores, and stretch marks show through every dyed area. Dye pools darker in the cut grooves and in the pebbled ground and sits lighter on the raised faces, so most of the modelling comes from the carving and only a little from the colour. Use three or four dye colours at most, all earth-coloured and taken from the photo.

WHAT CARRIES OVER FROM THE PHOTO
Keep the subjects of the photo, their number, their position, and their outlines. Nothing new appears and nothing is taken out. Anything worn, held, or sat on in the photo comes across as its own carved shape, counted off the photo exactly.
If a person is in the photo, keep their facial features, skin tone, age, hairline, and expression recognisable, carved rather than drawn.
An animal keeps its own markings as areas of lighter and darker dye divided by cut lines rather than painted detail.
Cut fur and hair as groups—a stroke for a clump, not one cut per strand.
Do not copy the sky, clouds, or anything far behind the subject. Turn these into the pebbled ground.

FAILURE CONDITIONS
1. Any letter, number, logo, maker mark, signature, date, or watermark anywhere in the frame is a failure. Lettering and signs that exist in the photo must become blank tooled leather.
2. Opaque flat paint—meaning any dyed area where the leather grain cannot be seen through the colour—covering more than a quarter of the panel face is a failure.
3. Any shape whose boundary is a drawn or burned line rather than a cut groove with a beveled drop beside it is a failure.
4. Pebbling covering less than half of the knocked-down ground is a failure.
5. Smooth photographic shading with no tool marks in it, covering more than a third of the panel face, is a failure. That would be a photograph printed onto leather, and this is not one.
6. A different number of people, animals, or vehicles than the photo has is a failure.
7. Any colour outside the earth range—blue, green, purple, bright red, or pink—covering more than a twentieth of the panel face is a failure.
8. If no cut edge of the panel is visible anywhere in the frame, that is a failure. Anything in the frame other than the panel, the bench, and the light is also a failure: no hands, swivel knife, stamps, thread, or second panel.
9. A horizontal image, a square image, or more than one image is a failure.

IF YOU CANNOT DO ALL OF IT
Prioritise the cut-and-beveled construction and the translucent dye. If a face will not come out carved without photographic skin texture, cut that face down to four or five tooled planes instead of adding texture. If a busy background will not reduce, knock the whole of it down to pebbled ground and leave only the subject raised.