The technique of embossing in leather. Cordobanes

July 16, 2022

The leather embossing technique

Leather is one of the materials that has been most useful to humanity since its origins, either for personal use or to make objects. tools. Therefore, having such a remote origin, the skin has been and is treated in a thousand different ways to beautify it, one of these techniques to achieve this is precisely the embossing technique.

INTRODUCTION

The technique of embossed It consists of working the leather to give it shapes and reliefs, achieving those baroque shapes so characteristic of some brands in their leather bags, although we also find this technique in metals or other materials. It is a technique introduced by the Arabs and of which Spain, due to its Muslim heritage, is one of the greatest references in embossing, even though Spanish skins are known as Cordoban.

Embossing is a job done by hand that uses tools such as tracers, modelers or matters and has several steps to follow. First, the design that we want to enhance on the skin is marked with plasticine, an easily moldable mass, and the same drawing is made on a hard surface such as cardboard. Next, the skin is moistened and volume begins to be given thanks to the mass that is underneath with the modeler. Once this process is finished, another special mass is fixed so that it is not lost later.

Once the embossing work is finished, the 2nd step begins: the polychrome, which consists of painting the leather, a technique that is more recent than the first. Polychrome, for its part, is a technique with a history since in cities like Granada it enjoyed such secrecy due to the competition that existed in that city that not all apprentices got to know the technique. But this, in order not to deviate from the topic, we will leave it for another publication.

WORK TECHNIQUES

The fundamental thing is to create a design on paper on which the author artistically forms the proposed model. The creation of this drawing is the most important and difficult part of the work to be done. Next, this design is traced onto vegetable paper and this, in turn, is placed on the skin, on the part of the ‘flower’, previously wet with water and a sponge. This is how it is reported by means of a punch or tracer, trying to keep the skin wet, based on the peculiar quality of the leather that accepts all kinds of signs when wet and lasts after drying.

Once the drawing has been reported, the carving itself can be started on the leather (always wet), according to the desired technique. Some of them are briefly defined:

Incised: It is obtained by means of an incising tool or knife whose groove can be opened, with the opening graver.

Modeling: It is a relief that is achieved by pressing the skin with the spatula and that, although it does not go beyond the surface, produces planes of diverse although shallow depth. For this we need a skin of thick meat.

Embossed: It is the best known of the leather techniques and the one we use in our production process. It consists of achieving a relief greater than the thickness of the skin, for which it is worked not only on the part of the grain, but also on the back, pushing upwards with the ball embosser until the desired relief is obtained.

Embossed: It is, in fact, a work common to several techniques used as an ornamental complement to the main carving, but not as such a technique in itself. Its practice is carried out with some iron mats or hardware that have small geometric drawings engraved on one of their heads, in relief or in hollow, which, when struck from the opposite side, leave a shallow imprint on the skin that embellishes certain smooth surfaces.

Mosaic: It is a decoration achieved with small and different fragments of skins of all kinds and colors, giving shape to the proposed design and executing it, generally by juxtaposition in the classical manner of the Roman mosaic.

Coloration: Since the skins have a very light tone, they are usually colored to make them more decorative, either completely in monochrome or in polychrome with various tints that increase their beauty. These are obtained from chemical substances, such as iron sulfate, postase, caustic soda, picric acid, or walnut, aniline and the most current alcohol dyes, acrylic paints and oil colors.

Metallic: In the guadamecíes, its main characteristic and beauty consists in the metallization of the surface, once carved, with silver or gold leaves that are indelibly adhered to the grain of the leather by means of a special mixing varnish. This must be in a drying degree called ‘mordant’ for which you have to wait a certain number of hours, depending on the case. Then we proceed to burnishing and already on the metal, colors are applied to the varnish, oil or wax to obtain the final patina.

STEP-BY-STEP TUTORIAL

This is the technique that I use to make the drawings to the pieces, I know there are some more but I haven’t learned it yet (time to time), I hope it will be useful to you:

The first thing we have to do is choose the drawing we want and trace it on the onion skin.

Next, we wet the part of the leather where the drawing is going to go a little, without going too far (if we see that the part of the drawing is then surrounded or of a different tone, what we will do is wet the entire piece so that it remains the same tone ) and put the onion paper on top.

With a fine round tip graver we go over the entire drawing being careful not to move.

After reviewing it, it would look like this:

So with that same burin what we do is go over it again directly on the leather once or twice or as many times as we want, depending on the depth we want to give it.

Once this is done, we moisten the back slightly.

And with a large round tip graver, which is appropriate for the size of the drawing, we go over the drawing from the back to lift it.

This is how it looks from the back:

When we see that it is convex (without going over) then with the spade graver what we do is go over the entire contour of the drawing, creating a shadow and the effect of lifting, that is, we lift the drawing and crush what we are not interested in be bulging.