First Impressions – a leather collection of dinosaur tracks and swim traces

From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of leather stamping studies.

A September study.

Volume I-C.

Early in the Jurassic, on the muddy shore of a desert lake, dinosaurs walked and swam, and the mud kept the minutes. First Impressions is a small leather collection about those marks – footprints and swim traces, pressed the way the originals were: by weight, into a receptive surface.

First, the luggage tags. We set a three-toed trackway walking the length of the tag, left foot and right foot alternating the way real trackways register in the stone, over the words STILL EN ROUTE SINCE THE EARLY JURASSIC. A tag announces a journey; this one has roughly 198 million years of head start.

Black-and-white EN ROUTE stamp artwork with five three-toed dinosaur tracks and an Early Jurassic travel line.

An Arizona-brown leather luggage tag blind-debossed with the EN ROUTE trackway design.

A pale Gray Sand leather luggage tag blind-debossed with the EN ROUTE trackway design.

A deep-blue Blueberry leather luggage tag blind-debossed with the EN ROUTE trackway design.

Next, we pressed a single Eubrontes track onto the keychain fob, with its name set plainly beneath, the way a museum would label it. Eubrontes is the name of the track rather than the animal, so the stamp claims only what the stone can prove: a foot was here.

Black-and-white EUBRONTES stamp artwork with one three-toed fossil track and its specimen label.

It looks genuinely beautiful.

An Arizona-brown leather keychain blind-debossed with an Eubrontes track and label.

A deep-blue Blueberry leather keychain blind-debossed with an Eubrontes track and label.

Then the toiletry bags, stacked honeyed russet over deep espresso like the strata of the surface. When a dinosaur crossed water too deep for walking, only its toe tips reached the bottom, leaving scrapes in parallel threes. We put that drifting rhythm in the corner of each bag, above the single word SWIMMER – a fair patron for a bag that spends its life beside water.

Black-and-white SWIMMER stamp artwork with three groups of three directional toe-tip traces.

Honeyed-amber and dark-espresso leather toiletry bags blind-debossed with SWIMMER trace designs.

For the catchall tray we drew the surface whole – a field of ripple marks inside a cracked mud border, with one trackway crossing on its own diagonal. Around it runs the plainest lesson the stone teaches: RIPPLES MEAN WATER, TRACKS MEAN SOMEONE PASSED. You look down into a tray the way you look down at the track floor, and what you carried today comes to rest there.

Black-and-white SURFACE stamp artwork with ripple marks, mudcracks, three tracks and two evidence-led lines.

An Arizona-brown leather catchall tray blind-debossed with ripple marks, mudcracks and a dinosaur trackway.

And finally, the journals. A trace fossil is a mark that turned into a record, and a journal is where your own marks do the same. In the lower corner, one small track stands over the words EVERY MARK A RECORD.

Black-and-white EVERY MARK A RECORD stamp artwork with one three-toed fossil track.

Looks absolutely gorgeous when stamped onto the leather.

A caramel leather wrap journal blind-debossed with the EVERY MARK A RECORD design.

A dark-espresso leather wrap journal blind-debossed with the EVERY MARK A RECORD design.

We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.

If you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.