Re: Captain Jack Sparrow Letter of Marque
Thanks all especially Mr. Magnoli considering it was your handywork on the internal portion.
To make this dust cover I looked through my scarp leather pile and found a nice piece of 2-3 ounce leather. I placed the L of M on the scrap leather and measured about 1cm from the edge of the paper to the leather and drew the rectangle. The corner triangular pieces and the bottom piece are pretty easy to make. The bottom piece is about 1 inch tall. I initially made it too tall and it covered part of Lord Beckett's signature.
The hard part was trying to figure out what design was on the front of the leather and how it was oriented. In this DVD screengrab you can sort of see it but it was still hard to make out what it really is.
Several searches on Google turned up nothing until I zoomed into the design. I remember seeing the similar design on a Tower of London image.
It is a " G R " with a royal crown on top. This was King George I royal seal. I had to use some artistic judgement here and use this image from a King George 2 royal seal found on a cannon from the period.
The royal seal was hand drawn on leather tracing paper and transferred to the leather. I traced out the image on the leather using a very fine tip permanent marker. I wet the area down and used an engraver to trace over the lines for some basic leather tooling. At the same time I etched the edges of the leather cover on the outside and used a handtool to punch the holes for stitching.
All items were stained using a combination of dark brown antique stain and medium brown alcohol based stain. The insides were done with water based brown stain.
After all the parts dried I sealed them with leather wax in order to prevent runoff of the leather. I am not to keen on the water based stains because it took forever to dry on the inside while the outside alchohol based stains dried in about an hour.
After all parts dried I did a dry run by placing the L of M back into the pieces for a fitting. It looked good so I started stitching it up. I ensured that the dark antique stain was for the flat areas but the tooled areas I used the medium dark brown as well so it would highlight the design.
I think overall the entire L of M is slightly larger than the actual movie prop and this piece is going to sit in my display. You can see the scale as Lord Beckett holds it in his hands in this sequence of shots:
And in Captain Sparrows hands:
I am working on a second cover that will be slightly smaller. I have a friend that uses AutoCADD to get an approximate size of the movie version using the Lord Cutler Beckett image sequence above. This second cover will be carried around as a costume prop. Eventually I will make a second L of M to fit inside but it won't be as detailed since I don't care if it gets damaged whilst out and about as Jack, savvy?
Does that help? Sorry no images but I made this under 1/2 a day non stop so I didn't think about pics until the final product.
