Resist and Antiquing

 I did a test to show some of the options with resist and antiquing. 

This photo shows my preparation for the process:

I first stamped the top piece of leather with the hats and slightly beveled around them.

Then I applied Neatlac in specific spots as I will soon explain.  Those areas stayed dark, even after the Neatlac dried, and I realized I would have to do the same on another piece of leather that was tanned differently.  You can see the difference in the effect of the Neatlac.  I did the same on both pieces, so when I refer to "B", it is the second hat from the left in the top row, on both pieces of leather.

A:  No resist, no dye.

B: Both hat and background resisted.

C: Just the hat is resisted with the Neatlac.

D: Only the background is resisted.

E: No resist, no dye.

F: Hat painted with white acrylic paint

G: Background dyed with Java brown water-based dye.

H: Background dyed and hat resisted.

After this, the Hi-Lite stain was applied:

Here is the result:

On both pieces the background dye around G and H almost completely disappeared - I think the Java brown dye and the Chestnut Hi-Lite colors were too close for the dye to show through in contrast.

And here is a quick tip:

After applying Hi-Lite stain, you always have to seal it in, because the stain leaves a residue on top of the leather.

If I am happy with how my project looks at this stage, I will often simply spray it with Leather Sheen aerosol - goes on shiny and then after five minutes you cannot even see that it has been sealed. 

In this case however, I wanted to get the Hi-lite stain off as much as possible and also make sure that the color was on as even as possible.   To do this, I applied the Neatlac with a sponge as you can see in this video:

All that remained now was to apply white acrylic paint to the hat in E.  In this case it was not very successful, but with things like flowers, it is often nice to get a bright color going on top of the Hi-lite stain.  I prefer option F where the Hi-lite stain slightly dulled the white of the hat, but you can see how much contrast there still is.

 The final result is as follows:

So I hope you can now see how you can use different pathways to achieve different results.

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