Leather project a winner

MORAN — Consider Michelle Heskett impressed, if not a bit freaked out.
“Look at his eyes,” she said, as she points to her newest creation, depicting a cowboy with his double-barrel shotgun aimed and ready to fire.
“His eyes follow you, no matter where you are,” Heskett said. “Same with the gun barrel.”
Heskett is talking about “Western Justice,” the name a relative gave to her painted leather display at the International Federation of Leather Guilds, Inc. competition in St. Louis last week.
“Western Justice” took first place in her age division and won a Board of Judges Award at IFLG’s Show Me The Leader 2010 competition, where she competed against artists from across the country. “We even had somebody from Japan,” she said.
Heskett, daughter of Paul and Lynn Heskett of Moran and a senior at Marmaton Valley High School, completed her painting during spring break week in March. She has been leather crafting for about nine years.
She was inspired to try the hobby by her aunt and uncle, Jane and Dave Turner, she said. “They were the ones who got me interested in it.”
Other templates for her work have included purses and cell phone cases.
Creating “Western Justice” involved taping and then tracing a picture of a cowboy on a blank leather canvas — “I’m not a very good drawer,” she concedes — before using a swivel knife to meticulously bore out the lines. That’s called “tooling” the leather.
Heskett then used a beveled blade to smooth the edges of her cuts to give her image a three-dimensional appearance.
“The bevel is what really makes the picture stand out,” she explained.
From there, she uses craft paint to color in the lines.
While she had some leeway with the cutting and beveling — “You can mess up at that part a little and still have it turn out OK,” she said — Heskett’s work with the paintbrush had to be exact.
One drop of paint in the wrong location would have meant starting over.
With her eye for detail, Heskett came up with just the right colors for the project — the cowboy’s deep blue eyes leering over the gun barrel particularly striking.
“I was pretty happy with how it turned out, but when I saw the other pieces at St. Louis, I figured there was no way I had a chance,” to win, she said. “There were some remarkable pieces.”
Heskett was named winner in her division on Sunday, capping off the three-day event. She received a certificate and blue ribbon affixed to a leather medallion.