My unique creative process starts with a design stage, which is usually a combination of good old fashioned paper and pencil and digital graphic design to test various compositions, sizes, and so on.

Once the design is finalized, next comes the material itself: Brain-tanned buckskin.
 

While brain-tanned buckskin  is one of the oldest types of leather -- dating back tens of thousands of years -- it remains one of the highest quality varieties to this day, being incredibly strong and luxuriously soft and supple.

Brain-tanned buckskin is named such due to the traditional use of fats found in animal brains to soften the hide. The “tanning” process is a rather simple but labor-intensive one, and the attention to detail necessary to produce good quality buckskin means it’s nigh impossible to accomplish with machines. This is why traditional buckskin is still made by hand today, in much the same way it’s been done for thousands of years.

While I used to tan buckskin myself, I can no longer do so due to an injury. For my art, be it a map, a portrait, or wildlife piece, I select only the softest and cleanest buckskins from professional and ethical tanners.

Since every hide is different in size, shape, color, thickness, suppleness, and other features, I further select the individual hide that fits the particular project I am about to create. This is the same whether I’m creating a single tree on a square inch of leather for my digital map packs, or an entire world map on a full skin.

Next comes the tracing of the design onto the leather in a process similar to the ancient method called “pouncing,” in which I lay the design (printed on paper) onto the skin, and then use a pyrography pen to poke holes through the paper, burning thousands of tiny dots into the hide underneath. This can take several hours, depending on the size and detail of the piece, but at the end I have a “map” of the design transferred onto the leather.

Then comes the main step that makes my work pop: The burning.

 
Pyrography is the art of “drawing with fire,” commonly used on wood (when it’s called woodburning). I use a custom-made, very fine-tip pen to connect all the dots I created during the tracing, and then begin to burn depth and shapes into the hide.

Being skin, the leather reacts to the heat by shrinking, which I use to my advantage to allow me to “sculpt” it into the various three-dimensional shapes: mountains, trees, rivers, wings, flowers, or whatever it may be.