Learning how to draw on leather can really help to speed up your work and help you to not waste time drawing something and then having to transfer it later.  This is article will show you how to draw right on your projects and feel confident in your drawing skills.

How to Draw On Leather

The first thing I do is find my center of the wallet where it will fold.  To allow room for the fold I make a mark 1/2″ on each side of center.  I do that on each edge of the wallet, so you should have four marks.

Now I draw a line connecting the marks to define the fold area… I don’t usually tool the fold on my wallets.  Next I set calipers to the width that I want my border and scribe my border lines.  You should end up with two tooling windows ready for design.

 If I’m  putting initials on the wallet I draw these in first.

Here I have placed a flower next to the initials which will seperate the initials from the floral nicely.  Next I draw in some scroll guidelines roughly to determine the flow I want within the pattern.

Now I begin to define my scrolls and vine work using my previous lines as a guide for flow.

I didn’t like how the flow was layed in at first so I just simply erase the two lines I don’t like.  Using the 8B pencil allows me to erase and leaves no impression of the lines behind.

I decided to fill some space with a leaf. When you add leaves and flowers into the pattern, keep the flow in mind so that it bends and shapes accordingly.

As you can see the leaf took a lot of the open space and the gaps can easily be filled now with scroll and vine work.  For the most part, the original flow I sketched in is maintained.  The only thing I really changed was using the leaf to balance the pattern a little.

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