DYE DYE DYE

Or, A Comprehensive Guide to Coloring Leather

So you’ve got a project you’re doing, you want to make it, say, black, and you walk into Tandy to buy your supplies, all, “I’m gonna get the stuff to make my project BLACK!” Except when you go over to the dyes section, all of a sudden you’re faced with at least five different bottles that say ‘black’ on them—which is the one you want?

Well, what you’re probably looking at are the following:

• Water-based dye
• Alcohol-based dye
• Oil-based dye
• Acrylic paint
• Highlight/antiquing gel/antiquing paste

Or more generally: dye, paint, and highlight. Highlights are something separate, the step after dyeing or painting, to give your carvings more contrast, and I’ll talk about them later, but broadly speaking, your options are dyeing or painting.

DYE OR PAINT?

The two main ways to color leather are either with dye (ie, a fluid that soaks into the leather and stains the fibers to be the color you want them) or with paint (a thicker substance that does not penetrate, just coats the surface).

Whenever possible, you’d rather be using dye, because it wins hands down in terms of durability. And what’s the point of combat-ready leather armor, if you have to be super careful with it so as not to damage the paint job?

Dye soaks down into the leather, so even if your project gets scratched, scraped, gouged, it’s not going to scrape off the dye and show the paler color beneath. Dyed leather actually tends to get more beautiful with age, because it takes on that gorgeous weathered patina that people go crazy and shell out the big bucks for.

However, there are a few situations in which you have to use paint:

1) Whites and pastels. Because veg-tan leather doesn’t start out white, it starts out a pinkish tan color.

You can’t dye leather a lighter color than what it started as — you’re only adding more colors on top. So if your target color is very pale or very sensitive to the leather’s underlying warm tones, you’ll have to paint it.

2) Similarly, when it needs to be colorfast over time. Leather naturally darkens with age, and since dye is layered with the color of the leather, the whole piece will get slightly darker and browner with age. It’ll still look good, but it won’t look the same, so if you need the colors to stay light and vibrant, you would need to go with paint.

3) Metal effects (which wound up becoming my specialty). Delicately tooled leather looks phenomenal with a dry-brushed metallic topcoat; the amount of texture and detail you can get with it is breathtaking, but obviously there’s no such thing as metallic dye.

4) Drawing designs/pictures onto the leather, as is frequently done with masks—because paint gives you more fine control over where the color goes than dye does.

5) When you are adding color to leather that’s already been finished and sealed. Dyeing only really works on veg-tan leather — latigo and chrome-tan have already been dyed and sealed over with a waxy or plasticky finish to help them resist absorbing liquids, which includes dye. (You can change the color a bit, add a slight stain to the surface, and the edges and underside will soak up the dye, but you’ll have very little control over how it turns out, and for chrome-tan in particular, dye will ruin the suede underside. It’ll never be as soft again, forever crusty after it dries, same as water.) I can’t think of many situations where you’d want to paint chrome-tan or latigo, but if you did, paint is your only option there.

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But all that said, dye is the better option because paint does not age well. Paint is much more vulnerable to abrasion; if your piece gets scraped or gouged, whatever color is underneath the paint is going to show. Excessive friction (if the piece is often rubbing against something else) will very quickly wear off that thin layer of paint. Not to mention that paint is usually less flexible than leather, so it’s liable to crack if the leather gets folded or bent too far.

PAINT OPTIONS

On the whole, painting leather is not much different from painting props out of any other material—if you have experience with painting and weathering foam, you’ll be able to transfer those skills to leather without a hitch. (And bonus, leather doesn’t melt when hit with aerosols.)

In order to combat the common problems when painting leather (peeling, cracking), your best paints for leather are going to have (1) high adhesion and (2) good flexibility, which you can get with high-quality acrylics.

For gold, my go-to is Golden Fluid Acrylics, thin body, iridescent bronze (#2450); it’s a flexible, non-tarnish acrylic that gives beautifully realistic results. You won’t find this brand at craft stores, but I’ve always been able to find it at art stores. It is a bit pricey, but a little goes a long way, and one coat is usually all you need.

(Nothing in this post is sponsored, btw — it’s just that there’s a lot of garbage out there on the market, and I’d like to save people from wasting their money on trial and error. These aren’t the only options, I’m sure, but these are the products I’ve used to get the results I do.)

The features you want to look for in a metallic paint are (1) thin body, because you don’t want it adding texture to the surface, just gilding the texture that’s already there, and (2) very fine, very dense pigments. The pigments have to be small enough and smooth enough to fool the eye into thinking that you’re looking at solid metal—cheap paints will have less pigment, usually in larger pieces, and when you try to paint your project, it’s going to look like it’s covered in glitter, not made of metal.

Angelus has a line of acrylic paints for leather, in addition to their dyes (the painted quiver shown above was done with Angelus paints). Personally, I’ve only used it in cream-white, and it took two coats to get solid coverage, but I was pleased with the results—the thin body means it keeps the texture of your tooling, rather than smothering it under heavy paint.

I’ve occasionally seen them at art stores before, or you might have to order them online.

Another good option is acrylic paints meant for fabrics, because they’re also designed to dry flexible. Jacquard is an excellent brand that comes in many beautiful colors (Lumiere is their iridescent line) and I’ve never had a problem with them cracking. I believe you can also find them in some craft stores; definitely in art stores.

It is less dense in pigment than Angelus or Golden Fluid Acrylics, so you’ll need to apply 2-3 coats, but I’ve used Jacquard to good effect on the Wonder Woman greaves:

Tandy has a line of acrylic paints—Cova Color, I believe it’s called—that is specifically meant for leather. I’ve used their silver and gold, and they were terrible (all the problems I talked about above—sparse pigment, big chunks that look like glitter), but their other colors might be better. (At many Tandy stores, the employees have made little sample swaths of the various dyes and paints, to show you what it looks like in practice, and you can decide from that whether you like it.)

And lastly, if you’re going to put a clear topcoat over your paint job, just remember that acrylic paints should be paired with acrylic sealants. Personally, I don’t use a topcoat for painted leather—basically the only thing I ever use acrylics for is metal effects, and I’ve found that it looks less realistic after it’s been sealed, because the sealant gets into the darker crevices and makes them sort of shiny, which contradicts the grime/aging effect. The Golden Fluid Acrylics is durable enough that it doesn’t really need sealing — just be careful not to batter it around when wearing your costume, and then safely wrap up the pieces to store them.

WAX-BASED PIGMENTS

The best-known brand of this is rub-n-buff, but I’ve found off-brands that work just as well. You can find these at craft stores, in the section for gilding things.

You don’t use a brush for applying wax-based pigments—you just rub a very small (VERY SMALL) amount on the pad of your finger and then smudge it lightly over your project surface. It goes on beautifully, glosses onto the raised surfaces without getting into the crevices, and the broad pad of your finger diffuses it better than a brush, none of the streaks that you get from bristles. The wax means it’s flexible and will move with the leather. It will be, hands-down, the most gorgeous, realistic metallic effect you can get—

—when it’s new.

The problem with wax as a medium is that it never really dries, and there is no way to seal it. It’ll continue to slowly rub off (though probably in amounts so small that it won’t make noticeable smudges), and if you try to spray or paint a clear topcoat over it, it will simply melt into a mess. Doesn’t matter what kind of sealant it is, there is literally nothing you can apply over rub-n-buff to preserve it. (And you don’t have to take my word for it, do a test piece yourself.)

(Also the gold, in particular, is not colorfast—it will tarnish and turn outright green. It’s hideous.)

What this means is that your piece will fade and get dull with time and need regular (1~2 times per year) reapplication. Which may be fine, if it’s an item you’re making for yourself and you don’t mind doing occasional upkeep on it, but if you’re making stuff to sell, you’re going to want something that ages better, like paint.

DYE OPTIONS

Alright, now we’re getting to the meat of this tutorial — leather dyeing, which is fairly unintuitive, and harder than it looks to get good results. You’ve got three main options, although in my opinion, only one good option.

Water-based dyes: are good for the environment. That is about the only nice thing that can be said about them. They tend to give you a grainier-looking dye job than alcohol-based dyes, less vibrant colors, and THEY ARE NOT WATERPROOF. You can try to seal them with a waterproof topcoat, but that’s no guarantee, and if they ever get wet they will bleed like crazy. “Eco-Flo” is Tandy’s water-based line, and I’d steer clear of their dyes. (Steer clear of most of their stuff — honestly, Eco-Flo products are never going to be your first choice.)

The bottles of Eco-Flo products look very similar, but if it says “leather dye”, it’s water-based. Not to be confused with “waterstain”….

Waterstain: is a specific Eco-Flo product, and despite the similarity between the names, it is nothing like water-based dye, so please do not get them confused, you’ll be in a world of hurt.

It’s something halfway between a dye and a paint, that leaves a stiff, waxy finish on the surface. You don’t dilute it, and unlike the water-based dyes, it is waterproof. Instead of going on like watercolor (the way water- and alcohol-based dyes do), you have to work the pigment into the surface of the leather with a dauber or with your fingertips. (It, uh, should go without saying that you wear gloves for all of this. Leather = skin, so leather dye is also very good at dyeing your skin.)

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to get an even color application across large sections — it’ll be darker in places, lighter in others, and trying to rub more dye into the light sections just makes the places where your dye overlapped darker AGAIN, in a terrible, vicious cycle.

The one color this doesn’t matter with — black — is also not great, because their black comes out pretty faded-looking when it dries, and when it’s dry, it cracks the surface of the leather if you try to fold it. Yeah, because that’s what I want my project to do on the very last step.

That said, the Waterstain black is actually a good choice for the dark basecoat on armor that’s going to get dry-brushed with acrylics for that metal effect. The Waterstain has the benefit of only needing a single coat to get solid black coverage (alcohol and water based dyes are usually going to need at least two applications, with the less-saturated areas becoming visible as it dries), and whatever waxy stuff is in it means that it can double as an edge & underside slicker. Alcohol and water-based dyes turn kind of crusty when they dry, and the fuzzies on the edge and the underside of the leather become scratchy until you smooth them down with gum tragacanth or something. (Which I talk about in How To Finish Your Edges.) With the Waterstain black, you can smooth down the edges and underside in the same step when you’re dyeing the rest of it, which saves a lot of time. That it goes on blotchy doesn’t matter, because it’s all black, and you’re going to be painting gold over it anyway. That it cracks if you fold it doesn’t matter, because it’s armor, it doesn’t fold.

Since I happen to make a lot of gold armor, I use the black waterstain near-daily for stuff that’s going to get painted gold or silver, and for absolutely nothing else. It is not a versatile substance.

Oil-based dyes: will give you rich color, but are prone to rubbing off on everything, forever, they never fully dry, and they’re likely to pool oil spots onto the things they come in contact with.

The one and only use I’ve found for oil-based dyes is doing gradients, because they “spread” further than either water- or alcohol-based dyes before drying up.

When I was still doing kink gear, my signature style was cuffs/collars/etc with a base color that faded into black along the edges, and that fade effect can’t be achieved without oil dyes (or an airbrush setup). Alcohol- and water-based dyes can’t do it because they dry too quickly and leave distinct lines and streaks.

“USMC Black” is a name you’ll hear a lot in leatherworking circles — it’s a Fiebings product, an oil-alcohol hybrid, and it’s… oh boy, it’s powerful stuff.

It will turn your stuff black — but unless your piece is sealed very well, it will also smudge off small amounts of black pigment forever. It will stain anything — some leather is kind of slick (pores closed), or is smudged with something that’s acting as a resist, and won’t want to take dye, but O God, it will take USMC Black. It’ll be one of the deepest, richest blacks you’ll find, and it will be black forever — that which USMC Black touches is now black until the end of time. It is potent, volatile stuff that should be kept away from heat and open flames, and if you use it without adequate ventilation you will choke on the fumes. And lastly, USMC Black will escape its containers at every opportunity, so be absolutely certain that it’s sealed away in multiple layers, thoroughly insulated from anything you don’t want getting stained.

(To wit: when I was driving from Texas to California and smuggling a gallon of USMC Black with me (it is, needless to say, illegal in California), it was in a sealed, unopened bottle, wrapped in a plastic bag that had been tied off at the top, and packed snugly upright with my other dyes at the bottom of a plastic trash bin. To this day, that bin still has black stains in it.)

You can’t remove stains of USMC black, but to clean it up, or to dilute it, you would use denatured or rubbing alcohol, same as alcohol-based dyes.

I don’t use the USMC Black much — I got out of the habit when I was in California and it was hard to come by, so I used my stock sparingly — but it’s very good to have on hand for doing gradients, or when you need to cover something that’s resisting all other dyes. It’s a bit too potent for everyday use though, so my go-to dye is actually–

Alcohol-based dyes: YES. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT. Stop fucking around with the other things, just take my word for it, your best all-purpose option is alcohol-based dye. (Sometimes also called “spirit dye.”) Features of alcohol-based dye:

• It’s completely waterproof
• It produces a much more vibrant color than either water- or oil-based dye
• It is easy to dilute with denatured or rubbing alcohol
• You can mix it with other alcohol-based dyes to create an unlimited palette of custom colors
• It’s not going to bleed or stain the other pieces of your costume once it’s dry

Tandy’s alcohol-based line is Fiebings, and you pretty much can’t go wrong with Fiebings products—it’s an old, old brand that has withstood the test of time. Ten out of ten crusty old cowboys recommend Fiebings, and if your local Tandy sells it, that’s what you should be making a beeline for.

…Unfortunately they may not, because some states (coff, California) have chemical laws that prohibit the sale of Fiebings. In which case: Angelus!

Angelus is a California-based company whose alcohol dyes are functionally indistinguishable from Fiebings—if you know how to work with one, you know how to work with the other, and that is a very good thing because–

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Using alcohol dyes: a skill for life

Lastly, and perhaps the best reason to use alcohol-based dyes, is that they’re never going to change. Alcohol dye was around before you were, it will be here after you’re gone, and if you can master it, that’s a skill that will stand you in good stead forever.

This is important because dyeing, out of all the leatherworking skills, is the one that is most dependent on experience. I didn’t mention it sooner, but I actually kind of hate dyeing — it’s so temperamental, you only get one shot at it, and (because leather darkens so much when wet) you have no idea what it’s going to look like once it dries.

And it’s permanent — there is no taking pigment out of leather once you’ve dyed it. And it’s usually close to the final step — so if you fuck up at that point, that is a lot of time and material you’ve wasted.

And you can watch all the videos and do all the research ahead of time, but the simple fact is that you’re not going to be competent at leather dyeing (and by competent I mean: able to consistently make it come out the color you’d intended) until you have a lot of experience under your belt. Dyes are so fussy, so fiddly, so dependent on so many different factors, and only time, and trial-and-error, and “getting a feel for it,” are going to teach you how to get the results you want.

Moreover, every type of dye is different. Water-based doesn’t behave like alcohol-based doesn’t behave like oil-based doesn’t behave like waterstain; mastering one does not mean that you can competently use the others, and man, wouldn’t it really suck if you started to get the hang of a product, only for Tandy to suddenly discontinue it? Leaving you to start over from square one, having to learn the ins and outs of a totally new product—

—like Eco-Flo is constantly doing, always shaking up their dye line-up, probably because it always fucking sucks, and they keep trying and failing in new and exciting ways. In the years since I started leatherworking, they’ve come up with a number of new products have popped up and fallen by the wayside and been replaced with new things with unfamiliar application methods. “All-in-one” is out, “Pro waterstain” is in, no wait, we’re just calling it “waterstain” now, and look, they have an oil dye!

(And frankly, both the waterstain and their oil dye are such flaming garbage that I expect those experiments to be short-lived too.)

This does not endear them to the crusty old cowboys who are afraid of change, nor to me, because FOR FUCK’S SAKE, I FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW TO USE THAT STUFF AND NOW YOU’RE DISCONTINUING IT??

Meanwhile, Fiebings hasn’t changed their formula or their roster since roughly the civil war, so if you can get a solid handle on working with alcohol-based dyes, then you can use Fiebings (or Angelus) forever, without worrying that they’re going to rip the rug out from underneath you.

Not to mention that none of it is as good as Fiebings/Angelus alcohol dyes anyway. So seriously—just do yourself a favor and start with alcohol dye from the get-go.

Okay, so where do I buy this stuff?

Answer: probably Tandy.

Tandy is a multinational chain of leatherworking supplies—odds are good there’s a brick-and-mortar store in your area, and if there’s not, you can order from their website. Fiebings and Eco-Flo are Tandy brands, their alcohol-based and water-based lines, respectively.

Angelus prefers to sell through intermediaries (probably some tax thing), so it’s usually cheaper to buy them from a secondary supplier—I’ve ordered mine through Dharma Trading Company, because it was close to where I used to live, but there are plenty of resellers on eBay, etc as well, and you can check Angelus’s website for a list of brick-and-mortar stores that carry their products.

Sometimes chain craft stores like Hobby Lobby or Michaels will also carry Tandy-brand leatherworking supplies, but I would avoid the store brands, or brands you don’t recognize—they know they’re selling to newbies who don’t know any better, and they’ll cheerfully let you waste your money on garbage. Fiebings and Angelus are the brands used by professionals, you can’t go wrong with them.

An aside on “cosplay hax”

…I wouldn’t. And this isn’t just me being a snob, my concerns are:

• You lose even more control over what color you’re going to wind up with
• There’s no telling what’s going to happen to the color as it ages
• Or how much it’s going to rub off on your skin and the other pieces of your cosplay
• Do you really want to walk around smelling like koolaid/coffee/whatever the kids are using these days?

Fabric dye could potentially work — after all, it’s designed to be color-controllable and colorfast — but it’s also far less concentrated than leather dye. It’s intended for the fabric to be completely submerged in it for a while, to really soak it in, and you don’t want your leather to get that waterlogged, that’ll turn it very stiff. (And if you’ve carved & tooled your leather, then soaking it is going to lose the crispness/detail.)

The sharpies hack is actually not a bad one. Because the stuff in sharpies is pretty much identical to alcohol-based dye, so it’s not going to rub off, fade, or smell weird once it dries. When you reverse-engineer sharpies to get the ink out, you’re basically just making dye the hard way—but it’s a false economy, in both time and money. You can get a 4 oz bottle of leather dye for less than you’ll spend on the sharpies, save yourself a ton of time, and be able to control the color better.

That said, if there’s no Tandy’s near you and you’re leery of buying online, or you don’t have money but you do have a huge stack o’ sharpies, or if it’s 1 AM and your con is tomorrow and your costume needs to get made tonight, then I give you my blessing to make sharpie-dye. But if you’re looking for a substitute you can buy locally, you might be better off looking for a bottle of permanent artist’s ink that you can dilute, rather than taking your chances with koolaid. The only key feature here is that it should be alcohol-based—beyond that, it doesn’t matter what the dye/ink was intended for, you can dilute it with rubbing alcohol and use it to good effect on leather.

HOW TO APPLY LEATHER DYE

(Everything from here on out is about alcohol-based dye, unless stated otherwise — most of it’s probably true for water-based dyes as well (though not waterstain), just use water instead of alcohol as your solvent. USMC Black also dilutes with alcohol, but other oil dyes are weird and do not play well with most fluids, and I don’t have the hands-on experience to talk about them.)

Step 1: dilute your dye

First of all, you need to be aware that the dye in the bottle is extremely concentrated. And this is a feature, not a bug — they are doing you a solid, they are selling you a product that will stretch very far, but that does mean you have to dilute it yourself. You CANNOT apply it directly from the bottle to your leather unless the dye is like, yellow.

The dye you get in the bottle is meant to be diluted, with a ratio of dye:solvent anywhere from 1:1 to 1:10, depending on how dark or how light you want it. The solvent for water-based dyes is water; the solvent for alcohol-based dyes is either rubbing alcohol or denatured alcohol, whichever is more convenient. (Or, in a pinch, acetone, but it is extremely caustic and will corrode the surface of your leather, making it look dull and lifeless.)

As I mentioned earlier, you’ll have no idea what color it’s going to turn out unless you do a bunch of test swatches in advance of your actual project, and then wait a full 10~24 hours for it to dry. That is the only way to know for certain how it’s going to turn out — which you may or may not have the time and patience for.

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So the biggest challenge in dyeing leather is getting smooth, even, solid color across the surface. Leather is very porous — I often compare veg-tan leather to a sponge — it wicks up liquids very quickly, and unless you take precautions, your dye job is going to come out blotchy when some areas absorb more dye than other areas.

The way to address this problem is to apply a large amount of liquid to the leather at once, more than it can immediately absorb, so that the dye can spread evenly across the surface before it stops. The most reliable method for this is —

DIP-DYEING

This involves making a large batch of diluted dye (usually somewhere in a dye:solvent ratio of 1:5 ~ 1:8) in a shallow-bottomed container, and submerging the entire piece in the dye bath, from a quick dunk to ~10 seconds. I use Angelus alcohol dyes for this, paired with either denatured alcohol (which you can buy by the quart in hardware stores) or rubbing alcohol (the higher % alcohol the better), in large tupperware containers.

(Acetone is not your friend — it will dull the surface of your leather and it will eat through your gloves. There are literally no gloves that acetone will not disintegrate; latex and vinyl last about thirty seconds, first going cold in the fingertips (an ~endothermic reaction~!) and then dissolving into tatters. Butyl rubber lasts the longest, but even that’s on a countdown.)

There are several advantages to dip-dyeing — it will give you the most even color possible*, it’s hands-down the fastest way to dye leather, and it will dye both sides, which is a nice touch that makes your project look more professional, instead of flashing a distractingly light, unfinished underside.

*There is a chance that your piece will still come out blotchy, even from a dye bath. Leather is an organic material, the density will vary even across the same hide, which affects how fast or slow it will absorb liquid; if the surface has gotten smeared with something, waxes or oils or whatnot, that will also act as a resist and create lighter spots in your dye job.

You can use a brush or dauber to selectively apply extra dye to the lighter areas, but it’s never going to be perfectly smooth, and that’s okay. That’s part of the look of leather. If you want perfectly sterile, pristine color, you should pick a different medium.

The drawback, obviously, is that dip-dyeing requires a lot of dye — more than the project needs — in order to make the dye bath deep enough for dunking. (A little 4 oz bottle of Angelus probably isn’t enough to make a dye bath unless your project is very small.) It also limits your palette, because you can’t mix colors on the fly without creating a whole new dye bath. (And it’s super messy, dye will drip everywhere.)

You’re also going to have a lot of leftover dye that you’ll need to store somehow. Alcohol dye and its solvents are very volatile, they will evaporate through the smallest crevices. The most foolproof way to store it is obviously to pour it back into the bottle and cap it, but if you don’t have a bottle big enough, or if you want the dye bath to be more accessible so it’s less of a production to use it, then you’ll have to find a completely airtight bin, which is easier said than done. Standard tupperware doesn’t work — even that tiny seam around the lid is enough for alcohol vapors to escape, and your dye bath is going to turn into sludge. (Which you can then reconstitute with more solvent, but still.) I’ve had decent luck with the Rubbermaid Brilliant line — I wouldn’t trust it not to leak if you turned it upside down, but they do a pretty good job preventing evaporation.

Basically, if you do a lot of leatherworking, it can be very convenient to have prepared dye baths of the colors you use most often — I keep containers of Angelus black and Angelus dark brown on hand. But for the occasional leatherworker, or in smaller volumes, dip-dyeing isn’t necessarily feasible.

APPLYING DYE MANUALLY

There are many ways to do this; every leatherworker tends to develop their own method and then get dogmatic about it. I’m going to talk about my technique and the reasons behind it, but you may find that a slightly different approach works better for you. Basically:

• Use a brush (my choice) or a wool dauber
• Apply diluted dye in large swathes, covering the entire surface as quickly as possible. You don’t want the visible line from the edge of the dye blob.
• I often dampen the leather with water before applying dye, to keep it from absorbing immediately
• Make long, back-and-forth strokes with your applicator, going in the same direction. Don’t make round little swirly motions with the applicator.
• Keep layering on the diluted dye until the leather is saturated and the color is even across the surface.

Then you step back and let it dry and see how it turns out — remember, you can always add a second coat if it’s too light, but if it’s too dark, that’s the color you’re stuck with. When you’re first starting, err on the side of too light (ratio of 1:5 ~ 1:8), because you probably need less dye than you think you do. Also, it will get slightly darker with highlights and sealants, and darker with age.

For the record, this is how that particular project looked when it was done:

EMBELLISHMENTS

After you’ve done your base coat, you can add more complexity to your dye job by daubing a slightly darker color around the edges to make a gradient–

Or use the block-dyeing technique, which is where you wrap a small block of wood in fabric, apply dye to the block and then rub it over the surface of your piece, to transfer color to only the raised areas, which brings out the texture in the leather:

The layering of colors just makes for a subtly sophisticated effect.

WEIRD THINGS THAT DYES DO

This happens with black dyes — USMC black is infamous for it, but Angelus alcohol black does it too, it leaves a sooty sort of residue that rubs off on whatever it touches. For the top side of your leather, you can buff it with a sheepskin remnant to remove the excess pigment, and anything left will get sealed down when you apply your topcoat. For the underside of your leather, you should apply some kind of binding substance like gum tragacanth or tan-kote and slick it down.

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This happens occasionally with certain alcohol-based dyes, usually blues and reds. It’s distracting (and distressing) while you’re doing your dyeing, but it vanishes immediately when you apply your clear topcoat, so don’t worry about it.

MISCELLANEOUS TIPS AND TRICKS

If you want your color to be light but also BRIGHT, you can mix a small amount of white gesso into your diluted dye. I forget where I learned that, but it’s a trade secret for helping to offset the “muddying” effect from the underlying tan color of the leather.

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So after all that information I gave you on how to get solid color, there are times when you don’t want solid color — this is not a great picture of it, but you can achieve an astonishingly realistic wood-grain effect with just brown dye applied in parallel brush strokes.

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Aged gold is an easy effect to mimic, because all it requires is two colors: gold and dirt. Silver is trickier, because in real life, all the silver-colored metals (silver, iron, nickel, etc) do funny things as they age — they tarnish, or rust, or oxidize, and you need to keep that in mind when you’re painting and weathering them. Using only one color of silver is going to make the piece look flat, and subtly unrealistic.

The most realistic silver effects are going to involve a blend of multiple shades of silver, usually a first layer in a gunmetal color, a mid-layer in a warmer pewter shade, and then very bright silver leaf just barely gilding the most prominent edges and peaks. You can also add more nuance with a wash/highlight in the crevices — some options are brown (dirt), reddish-brown (rust, on “iron” pieces), or whitish-teal (vertigris, on “copper” and “bronze” pieces).

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Pro-tip! If you need two pieces to come out the exact same color (like for pieces that are going to be layered on top of each other, and need to match) you must dye them AT THE SAME TIME, FROM THE SAME HIDE. Every hide takes dye differently, and some colors (blues and greens) are extremely sensitive to the leather’s base tones. And even using the same hide, there are so many small variables in humidity and temperature and soak time that can dramatically change your results, and you want to make sure you’re using the exact same dye, applied with the exact same process, in the same environment. Trying to color-match two pieces after the fact is somewhere between “a nightmare” and “impossible.”

It’s usually not quite that extreme — and warm colors are much more forgiving than blues and greens — but it’s something you’ll want to keep in mind.

SAFETY FIRST

Bottles of dye are small, and light, and incredibly easy to knock over. You think you’re not gonna. You insist you’re going to be careful. You’re only doing this one small thing, it’s only going to take a moment—

Don’t play that game, my friend. It’s only a matter of time until you lose.

Get a mug you don’t mind ruining, and use it to hold your dye bottles upright. You will save yourself so much heartbreak. Other steps you can take, to avoid Mistakes Being Made:

Not all of that may be feasible for you, if you don’t have a dedicated space to set aside for leatherworking, but do consider what precautions you’re taking to protect your surroundings from your dyeing, because it will splatter (if you’re dip-dyeing it will drip all over the place), it will soak through the paper you put down and stain your tabletop, and you always run the risk of spills.

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Avoiding cross-contamination

Alcohol-based dyes will be waterproof when they dry, but they can be reactivated with solvents — denatured alcohol, rubbing alcohol, acetone — or by more alcohol-based dye. This means that if you try to reuse any brushes, wool daubers, rubber gloves, work surfaces, etc from a previous project, the residual dye is going to make an appearance on your new project.

This doesn’t mean you have to throw everything out after using it once, but there are some precautions you need to take:

• Assign certain brushes to certain colors (black, brown, blue, green, red, gold, silver, and clear topcoat, are the categories I’ve got) and only use them for projects with that color of dye. The old dye will reactivate, but it won’t matter because it’s the same color as the new dye.
• Same with your gloves — I’m a little bit more lax with this, but I’ve still got black, brown, warm colors, and cool colors separate.
• Put paper down before you dye. This isn’t to protect your work surface (hoo boy, that ship has sailed — don’t dye on a tabletop you aren’t willing to ruin), but so that you can easily see what dyes are present.

As long you’re dyeing things black, it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you changed the paper, and brown projects don’t care if the smudges on the table are red — but if you’re doing a more delicate color, where black or brown smudges will REALLY show poorly, then you should put down fresh paper.

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HIGHLIGHTS, ANTIQUING GEL, ANTIQUING PASTE

This is a necessary step if you have decorated your piece with stamping or carving — these gels and pastes are a thicker, darker substance to increase the contrast and make your designs more vivid.

They are applied after dyeing (or instead of dyeing); you glop on more than you need and rub it around to work well it into the crevices of your design, then wipe off the excess with a damp (not sopping) cloth or paper towel. It doesn’t soak in like dye does, so it wipes off the raised areas of your design and collects in the nooks and crannies.

Or that’s the theory, but, very important: highlights are going to stain your piece, at a least a little bit. They really bring a piece together and increase the cohesiveness of the colors, but they make it darker and gloomier when they do, so take that into consideration when you’re calibrating how heavy to make your initial dye job.

You can minimize the amount of staining by applying your topcoat/sealant first, letting it dry thoroughly, like, at least 24 hours, and then applying your highlight. If your topcoat isn’t completely dry, the highlight will stick to the tacky topcoat and you’ll find yourself with a lot of very ugly, blotchy color. If it’s dry, the highlight should wipe off easily without absorbing. (lol, should. Again, see above.)

Your options from Tandy are Eco-Flo antique gel and Fiebings antique paste. (You might also see a product called Eco-Flo “hilite” still kicking around — as far as I can tell it’s identical to the antique gel, it’s just an older name for the same stuff.)

I don’t hate the Eco-Flo highlights, but I like the Fiebings antique paste better. The paste is thicker, so it sticks in the cracks better (the Eco-Flo antique gel is a liquid, and sometimes it’s hard to wipe off the excess without wiping it out of the crevices too). The Eco-Flo also stains more than the Fiebings does (the thinner gel soaks in more than the paste). Which may not be a bad thing — if you like the color it stains the leather, then you can use the gel antique to do your dyeing and highlighting in one step.

Applying highlights is similar to the procedure for doing weathering effects, which a lot of people are going to be familiar with from other types of prop-making — using a thinned acrylic paint to bring out the details in your texture. Thinned acrylic paint isn’t the best for leather (tends to stick too much) but you can use it in a pinch, particularly if you’ve sealed it with a topcoat first. I’ve used it to good effect with cheap craftstore gold and silver (don’t use the Golden Fluid Acrylics for highlighting, it dries too quickly):

Antique gels and pastes are not waterproof (especially not the Eco-Flo ones), so you will need to be sure to seal your project with a clear topcoat when you’re done. (Which means you may end up with alternating layers of dye/topcoat/highlight/topcoat, if you sealed it to lock in the color before applying your highlight.)

TOPCOATS AND SEALING

After your dye dries, it’s going to be a lot lighter than it was when wet, but it’s also probably gotten dismayingly dull-looking. Fear not! Sealing it with a clear topcoat will restore the depth and luster that it’s lacking.

Again, you’ve got a lot of choice for sealants, but one widely recommended option is a 50:50 mix of resolene and water, applied with a brush or sponge.

Resolene is a clear acrylic substance, and it tends to go on too thick when straight out of the bottle and dries in textured streaks, but when thinned with water it will spread more evenly. It does require multiple coats to be waterproof (you can tell it’s sealed when subsequent coats don’t darken the leather when they go on), but you will end up with a water-resistant, mellow gloss finish.

Alcohol dyes (since they’re not water-soluble) will not “lift” when you’re applying a water-based sealant, so your dye job will be unaffected by the topcoat. Water-based dyes are prone to lifting when you’re applying the topcoat, so if it’s a delicate dye job that you don’t want getting muddled, you might want to use a spray sealant instead. (Or just use the goddamn alcohol dyes like I told you to.)

Fiebings has a spray sealant that I like a lot (that calls itself wax-based? idk), because it dries to a high gloss and goes on very quickly, which makes it convenient for weird-shaped projects that I need to finish in a hurry.

I use it sparingly though, because it’s more expensive than resolene and it smells like death. (Resolene is very low-odor, but this aerosol is not; you have to use it outside and then leave your project outside until it’s dry and no longer volatilizing.)

Eco-Flo’s “satin shene” is similar to resolene, but less water-resistant.

Fiebings “Tan-kote” is not waterproof, I don’t even know what the fucking point of that stuff is. It is the only Fiebings product that I hate.

Something you will hear mention of, but probably never see in the wild, are products with the suffix -lac (Neat-lac, saddle-lac, and I believe Barry King’s WyoSheen is in this family as well). These are lacquer-based products, and they used to be the go-to sealant for leather, but these days they’ve largely gone out of use. They’re made with some very nasty chemicals, and also (being a lacquer) they’re prone to cracking and yellowing, so they’ve been replaced with acrylic sealants that are more flexible and age better. Tandy stopped carrying their lacquer products* before I ever even started leatherworking, and the shipping restrictions for ordering it online are prohibitively strict, so I’ve never even worked with the stuff.

*I just discovered that Tandy does sell something called Neat-Lac, but given that it’s an Eco-Flo product and is “water-based”, it is clearly not what it used to be. And given Eco-Flo’s track record versus Fiebings’, I’d stick with resolene.

LEATHER CONDITIONERS, ETC

A question I frequently get is about the leather moisturizers/conditioners, the kind you buy to maintain leather jackets, upholstery, shoes, etc, and the answer is that you probably won’t need them for a long time. When the leather is new (chrome-tan) or newly sealed (veg-tan), you can’t apply them — the pores are all sealed, they won’t absorb any new substances. In time, as the topcoat gets worn away and the surface of the leather is exposed, you can apply moisturizers to keep it from drying out and to re-enrich the color when it starts looking dull.

Neatsfoot oil is something you’ll hear mentioned a lot, as an option for softening stiff leather — I’m not a fan, because (like dye) it’s hard to apply evenly instead of in blotches, and it will make your leather much darker, permanently. (I use it occasionally to make veg-tan mimic oil-tan, but if I just want to soften leather, I use–)

Lexol is my go-to leather conditioner, because it’s cheap and easy to come by (you can find it in the automotive section at Walmart, etc), goes on evenly, doesn’t leave much residue, and doesn’t change the color of the leather. It’s sometimes sold in a two-pack with a leather shampoo as well — skip the two-pack and just get the conditioner. Lexol is also what I apply to my leather before carving/tooling.

Carnuba cream is similar to Lexol, but leaves more gunk on the surface and makes it stickier. I have no use for it.

Aussie wax (called Aussie leather conditioner these days?) will darken the leather a little and make it suuuuper oily — I like it for bringing new life to old, scuffed-up leather shoes, but I don’t use it on any projects of my own making.

Saddle soap is something you’ll occasionally hear recommended as a leather conditioner, but in my experience that’s not a good use for it. Saddle soap is perfect for doing edges, but not for conditioning leather, it leaves too much waxy residue on the surface.

IN CONCLUSION

Leather as a medium presents some unique challenges to getting good color, and there is no substitute for practice and experience. Nonetheless, I hope this tutorial has given you a solid understanding of the options available to you, their pros and cons, and how to get started working with them.

If you have questions, if something was unclear, if there’s a product you heard about and want a second opinion on, absolutely hit me up — it will help me improve this tutorial, or give me ideas for what to address in the future.