About Brown Cow Art
Brown Cow Art, making high quality custom leather goods since 1999 and metal art since 2006.
Our primary medium is hand-tooled leather, resulting in a shallow-relief sculpture that is both beautiful and durable. After tooling, the leather is hand dyed with a brush, sponge, and/or airbrush. Every piece here was created from scratch, with all of the cutting, dyeing, sewing, patterning, and concepts done in-house. We rarely start from existing patterns except as inspiration, preferring to create our own designs. We use a broad range of techniques for the shaping, stitching, and forming of the structural pieces with an emphasis on durability using all-natural materials.
Leather carving is a slow and time-consuming process; the pieces represented here have between 2 and 20 hours of tooling work each and took up to 60 hours for the assembly.
More recently we've been infected by blacksmithing and metal shaping and are incorporating hand forged and formed metal into our existing portfolio. We are going several directions with this. First and foremost is hand forged hardware to accompany our leatherwork, second is traditional and modern forged steel art and tools, and lastly the production of historically accurate armor.
About the artist
Chip Brown has a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design where he specialized in multi-media design, with a strong interest in three dimensional illustration. He was first introduced to leather tooling in a grade-school shop class but it wasn't until college, with his new found interest in renaissance reenactments, that he started leatherwork in earnest. For the past 8 years he has worked full-time designing websites, interactive games, and corporate presentations while his leatherwork has remained a passionate side trade. No project is too daunting, and he is always interested in a new challenge.
As a good friend of his once said, 'He won't be satisfied until he's made a duplicate Earth and his biggest hurtle is where to find the materials."
