Yesterday I shared a photo of an attempt to engrave one of my friend’s bat mandalas on to leather.

Because the design has lots of very small details (itty bitty bats, surrounded by even tinier stars) it’s a real pain to weed something like this … or so I thought. I was putzing around in my studio yesterday when I noticed a giant roll of tape sitting on one of my tables. I have absolutely no memory of putting it there, but there it was.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that it was a roll of “2 Faced Tape”, given to me by another artist back in 2001-ish. I hung on to it all this time, because like any good magpie, I hoard art supplies forever. Still, I haven’t touched it since it was given to me, and I have no idea why it was on my table yesterday … but since it was there, and since my gorilla tape supplier fell through, I decided to try it on one of my earlier engraves. Whoosh! Everything came right off!

I decided to retry the bat design, to see if this tape could handle all those tiny bits. Here’s the before photo:

And here’s the after:

It did take a couple of passes, but it was still very easy!

That’s the bigger version up above (approx 3.25"). The smaller one below is about 2.5":

Here they are together, for comparison:

These pieces were done on my own 4 oz scrap leather, using 5-6 oz proof grade settings.

(edited to include the link to my friend’s site)