painting leather with oils

Any suggestions on how to paint leather with oils? I find my work is bland and not very realistic.

A little more detail might be helpful - old and/or new? Belts, boots or something else? Any particular colours? Better yet, post a pic or two of where you're at so that we might give more particular advice; there are different styles used in the hobby for painting leather and some might be more appropriate to the way you paint than others.

Leather in general is not hard to paint convincingly, since you say bland it's possible you're just not using enough tonal contrast from highlight to shadow? I generally slightly under-highlight leather, without skimping on the shadows, because the slightly gloss finish will provide natural highlights; if the leather were matt I'd paint the highlights much like I would for cloth though.

After that weathering is often good to give it character, although to be honest it's frequently overdone in the hobby (I do this too, deliberately, in smaller scales) so if you want to aim for a realistic finish I would definitely suggest collecting reference photos of reenactors to work from. Even if the leather is not historical - it is often chromium-tanned leather, not vegetable-tanned, and in colouring and ageing they can be quite different - simply reproducing what you see in a photo as well as you are able will give you results that most people would find very pleasing. At the very least pay attention to how your shoes, boots and belts age during use - you'll see for example that even years of wear will often not give the type of 'natural leather'-coloured edges we often use in modelling

Einion

I am putting in Roc's mix which I now use. I used this on the black knight and Naval officer in my work bench. This is a good mix because it dries with a bit of a shine.

The only exception is that I used Val. Leather Brown as the acrylic base.

1- base = Mars brown + brown madder Alizerin.
2- medium shadow = base + Wndsor blue.
3- deep shadows = medium shadow plus more windsor blue.
4- Extreme shadows = pure windsor blue.
6- medium highlights = Mars orange.
7- extreme highlights = Medium shadows + Mars yellow.
8- very extreme highlights = Mars yellow.

Keith

I should have been more clear, the color suggestions are great I am probably not adding enough contrast from highs to low lights. I have trouble doing belts that are tight with no curves such as German WW 2 "y" belts there is little oppourtunity to add shadows etc. I would be interested in creating a used or old distressed look to black or brown leather.

For that particular application you might consider undercoating with a reddish brown. Then add a dark brown almost black oil coat over this being careful to leave the edges of the suspenders exposed. Keep the oil coat thin, and after all is covered you can go back with a sharpened toothpick and create small scratches in the finish of the "leather" by removing tiny bits of the oil paint. After all this has dried you may want to give it a coat of satin varnish to give it a luster. Good luck.