Making a dice vault for my DM

Here is the final product for those of you not looking to see the whole process or the story.

But basically I’ve owed my DM a proper leather dice vault since March of this year for her Birthday (only 184 days late)

Here is the start of the test piece where I laid out a design onto a sample piece to figure out what sections of it would pose the most problems.

And then here is a 80% completed test piece. It has all the lines cut and most of them beveled to add depth to it. After beveling you go back in and add the finer detail work but I skipped a few steps for the test piece

After the practice piece I like to layout the pattern over the actual leather for the final project to see how it lines up and I realized I had way to much empty space at the top. So I separated the mountains from the sand dunes by about a half inch.

It still looked too empty so the next step was to add in clouds to the top raising the top of the piece and then adding in a border all around it.

Here is the final piece with the lines rubbed onto the leather. This is achieved using the trace pattern from above on top of the leather then drawing over all the cut lines to lightly bruise the leather.

The project is moving right along here are all the lines cut in with my swivel knife and the border plus the clouds added just the right amount of extra detail.

Now we have most of the lines beveled to show depth. The goal here is to make the picture pop so that the closer objects stand out more.

After finishing up the bevels I went back in to make fine detail cuts and small tool marks to bring out the flowers the cactuses,then you use a matting tool to add texture to the sky and mountains so that the acrylic paints soak in.

The sides of the dice vault were looking kind of bare at this point so I decided to put a d20 on both sides one a success and one a failure (unfortunately my success side was a failure) I rotated the 4 on the 14 making what is now known as a derpteen by my party.

Lucky I had a backup dice vault that I could cannibalize one of its sides from. Project is back on track sans derpteen.

Here is the start of putting down acrylic colors. The process for this involves watering down the acrylic paints to the point that they are almost water colors. Then you do multiple layers till you get the desired depth of color.

Final look at the color once all the layers are applied as you can see the numbers are all facing the right way this time.

Last stage in leather is also one of the most dangerous we applied stain to the untooled leather making it antique. Unfortunately the staining got onto the right side of my picture giving the sky a sickly yellow color. It took another 20-30 layers of paint to get that part of the sky back to normal

Final part of production was lacing up the sides and adding a wrap around draw string you can also see here that the sky is mostly back to its normal blue. Overall the project was a blast and although it was super late she loves it. Took me probably around 15-20 hours between the concept piece and final project but it was well worth it.

Finally for those who have stuck around here is the cat tax. Romeo is our oldest cat in white. Sylvester is the middle child in black. And then the newest addition is Percy in orange.