This project has been sitting on my back burner for way too long, it’s finally time to put it out into the world. The design was a scaled-up version of a bracelet design I made quite a while ago, substituting a buckle for a snap.

The fancy thing I set out to do here was to paint the suckers with glow-in-the-dark acrylic, then stain the leather over that, so the paint acted as a resist for the stain, leaving it lighter than the surrounding leather. I did that with a base coat of green, then on top of that all painted blue and green interference paints to give it an iridescence.

The issue was that the suckers on the tips of the tentacles are freaking tiny! It took a lot of concentration to paint them accurately. Then I had to do like 4 coats to get a thick even coating of paint to make the glow look good. It took hours and hours of really eye-crossing up-close work.

I do like this idea rather a lot, but if I’m going to make another I’ll need to re-draw the design with bigger tentacle details so I don’t drive myself crazy with the painting. So this particular collar will remain a unique one-off.

If you’d like it, drop me an offer. I’ll probably post it up on Etsy in a few days, but that’ll take coming up with a price that both seems fair to me and isn’t way too high for the customer.

4-5 oz vegetable-tanned leather, laser-cut and etched, nickel-plated buckle and rivets, water-based leather stain, acrylic paints. Shown under black light. More photos over on my Tumblr.