Step-by-Step: Transfer (Stylus)

I mentioned yesterday that there's another technique I tend to use pretty often to transfer a design onto a piece of cased leather.  Tap-offs work great for large or simpler designs but they don't really work at all for designs of any complexity.  For that, I have to apply a somewhat more modern technique (in so much that paper is more modern than leather) and trace the design onto the leather from a print-out using a stylus or scratch awl.

This is about as tedious as it sounds but what I dislike most about it are the replication errors that tend to pop up.  This is really only relevant for symmetrical designs but using this method means going over the design at least two or three times by hand.  It's kinda like playing the old school yard game of telephone in that way; all the details tend to get a bit fuzzy.  For most designs I can work around that by incorporating any transfer errors into the design on the leather, goodness knows I've had enough practice, so there's no harm done in the final product.

In this case though, I'm attempting to transfer the Talk Nerdy logo onto a 2.125" wide key fob.  This logo worked really well on a ~3" wide buckle, but at just over half that size it's taken on entirely new challenges.  A lot of care has to be taken to make sure none of the lines overlap or cross each other where they're not supposed to.  The design has a fair amount of symmetry and precision that's going to make it a fair challenge to reproduce at this scale 50 times.  Well, as the kids say these days: challenge accepted!