The Carcosa Hat Project

A design for a hat with multiple panels that are to be carved in leather. The leather was already cut but my client lives in a different country so the design needed to be made using a guess of the dimensions and how they interact together.
I built a replica hat at 1:1 scale out of cardboard covered with whiteboard sheet, so that I was able to draft the design and see how the panels interact together. This process was very easy since I simply drew on the mock up hat and was able to erase the ink if areas needed correction.
I photographed the panels and drew over them in Photoshop, cleaning up or redesigning areas and making them suitable for printing. I sent tests to my client to print at his end, to confirm the method was transferable to his physical leather. After calibrating his printer to the correct printing size, and a little adjustment to some of my borders, I was able to send the full design for the hat for him to carve and assemble. Each scene represents places or characters in a story set in the world of Bicolline, a LARP in Quebec, Canada.