Floral is another style that I just love and it’s one of the more advanced, as it involves taking flat stamped impressions and tooling them to look like real flowers and leaves. Usually the flowers and leaves are defined first with a swivel knife or fine edge stamps, to create hard edges that will later be used to contain the tooling. Then bevelers are used to push up the center of the petals and leaves, which helps to give them a rounded, more dimensional appearance. The amount of beveling done on each petal or leaf should be varied depending on which part it is. You would want to use a deeper beveling stroke at the bottom of a petal, where it would naturally be thicker where it meets the stem, and less at the top where the petal would naturally be thinner. This helps keep the flowers from looking boxy and adds to their natural appearance.
The third dimension is accomplished through shading, which provides contrast and creates the illusion of how the light would naturally hit the flower. A pear shader or lined background tool is used to deepen the crevices and then gradually soften to the outer areas, which results in the illusion of a petal’s curvature. A steady application of pressure is needed in the recesses of a flower, and should be gradually softened as you approach the outer petals to achieve the illusion of highlighted outer petals. Too much shading will result in flattening the beveling, and too little will leave the flower two-dimensional. I have seen other artists use reference photos of real flowers to observe where the shading should be applied based on natural shading, petal veins and petal folds.
Background texturing provides the last form of contrast and brings the flowers out by defining the space behind them. Evenly using a matting tool or random stipple in the negative space makes the tooled flowers seem to rise above the leather, adding to the sense of depth without creating visual distraction. The background texture should be consistent in density to give the illusion of a solid surface, rather than scattered spots, but not so dense that it distracts from the primary design. In advanced designs, the background texture may be denser near stems to imply shadow, and less dense further away to create the illusion of distance and space. This consideration of the background is what differentiates an amateurish floral design from an awe-inspiring one.
The difficulty in working with flower groupings is spacing and the relationship of the flowers that overlap. Generally the largest blossom will be the center of the flower and the smaller buds and leaves will grow out from this center and be arranged organically rather than perfectly symmetrical. Overlapping leaves and blossoms will be tooled first with the underneath piece and then beveled around the piece that overlaps it. If a leaf is mostly hidden by a petal it will need to be beveled lightly so it will appear to be recessed and anything in the foreground will need to be beveled heavier. I like to draw the design onto tracing paper to arrange the flowers and leaves to my liking before transferring them onto the leather. It is easier to correct overcrowding or a poorly designed piece before spending hours tooling.
Once you have a good foundation with floral tooling, leather can become whatever you want it to be. Each flower looks as if you have just snatched it out of the ground and pressed it into the leather. Technically, advanced floral is pretty exacting, but it also requires an appreciation for size, lighting, and the way nature moves. With experience, you will start to decide how the flowers and leaves should look, rather than just copying exactly what you see in front of you. You might like your leaves to twist a certain way, or the veins in the leaves to look a certain way, or the petals to curl a certain way. Even the angle of the stem might be your personal preference. The end result of a nicely tooled floral panel on a belt, bag, or book cover is rewarding, both to the tooler and to the person who appreciates all the work that went into it.
