Painting old leather bags vol. II

Found some poor, unwanted leather bags in the free section at Kierrätyskeskus again, 

so naturally I had to give them a loving home! 

This morning I took a few hours before school work to do a spot of painting, 

here's what I've done so far:

A newly scalloped white bag, 

though I feel it might benefit from some touches of gold paint (will need to go buy some soon..!):

The scallops still need a few touch-ups, and the gold details:

This started off as minty polkadots, very quickly switched to minty triangles from which things escalated to minty water droplets: I shall name him the Walter Droplet bag! *hmm, though he seems to be named ''Phillippe'' already...

And a Sanna Annukka inspired birdy bag:

Day 1 (unfinished)

Day 2: Finished, though upon careful inspection, it still needs a coat of black paint in places.

Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool:

Bagging around...

Found this little darling in the free section of the Kierrätyskeskus and took it home with me.

It was a bit worse for wear, so I decided to cover most of the front flap with some paint..

And that's what I've been doing for the last few days! Those lines are really hard to draw free hand, especially since the paint and/or brush I used were acting up a bit...

After one layer the colour wasn't even enough,

 so a few careful coats of paint and some de-clumping action were needed.

 I have a few other bags still waiting to be painted, but I have yet to receive an epiphany on what to paint on them... but they're not going anywhere!

Revontulet

Had this red bag (also free, from kierrätyskeskus) that needed some tlc:

There's nothing really wrong with it, except that the shoulder strap is almost worn through in one part, but the colour red, as much as I love all colours, has never been the colour for me, at least clothes/accesories wise, so I figured I might as well spruce it up somehow and maybe I'll end up actually using it some day!

So I used this sketch by my sister as an inspiration and got to it:

   

I toyed around with the idea of making it more square, 

and thought I'd build up the fox out of small rectangles:

So I sketched out this fox shape, cut it out...

...and scratched it on to the leather with a thin metal pen tip:

I then painted it a stipply white...

...and pondered how I would paint the rectangles, 

ditched the idea cos it would take too long and the rectangles I painted with the yellow paint 

(which is the only colour I initially planned to use) 

just didn't stick out enough for it to work. 

So, I did some more stippling, with the yellow, 

and then got carried away and included pink and turquoise as well

In hindsight, I shall name the other inspiration for this bag as revontulet, or northern lights in Finnish. Revontulet literally means fire of the fox and there's a Finnish tale about how they are created, 

and the stippling and all the colours are kind of aurora borealis meets fox, yes..?

Now I just need to figure out what to use for the strap... 

some kind of thin but durable white rope, perhaps... 

Old bag fever

I've been down with a fever this weekend, yesterday I was more or less content with just lying on the couch or in bed, sleeping, watching tv, and feeling terribly sorry for myself.

This morning I felt a bit better, and as I'm not too good at sitting still I decided to finally do something about this grey leather bag I picked up in kierrätyskeskus for zero euros.

 So I got out my leather paints, and though I originally planned to 

paint this with some white and yellow, 

the white paint is a bit clumpy and the yellow doesn't cover well enough, 

so I opted for this minty turquoise instead!

Probably should've planned this out a bit better, but in my feverish state I really didn't feel like it..!

 Here's the part under the flap. I think they might be leaves of some kind.

 I've been painting it on and off for the last 5 hours, so it has gotten dark outside (hence the change in the perceived colour change in the bag for the last 2 photos).

I present to you, geometrics, painted with a wobbly fever-ridden hand:

I think I'll still do some more work on it tomorrow, or whenever I have time, 

but enough for tonight anyways (or it could turn in to one of those this-seemed-like-a-really-good-idea-last-night or this-looked-much-prettier-in-semi-darkness projects). 

Which happen sometimes. 

But hopefully not with this one!


(Update, the next day: finished the grey bag this morning, and it really is quite a greenish grey, now that I looked at it properly, so I'm glad I went with the turquoise paint!
Here's the finished bag:

I redefined some of the lines and made the blocked turquoise parts more vivid).