Western Art
about us
Bruce & Lisa Johanson
Where we came from
Brahma Custom Designs was started in 1989 as a custom cabinet designer and builder. This lead, in a very indirect way, to becoming a branded cowhide, western art supplier.
I don’t know much about fate, but it is hard to ignore how a little side project many moons ago lead to designing and building a tiny little router bit! Without this bit, Brahma Custom Designs wouldn’t be providing this unique art today.
We are very proud and humbled by the outpouring of gracious comments from our clients and customers. We’ve been invited into your homes, man caves, offices and she sheds. We’ve also been a major part of your Christmas’, holidays and events and we appreciate all the feedback!
The happy little accident that changed EVERYTHING!
On a lazy day just before Thanksgiving my family was busy planning the holiday dinner. With the smells of dishes being prepared wafting through the air I found myself tinkering around in my shop, absentmindedly pondering the upcoming family get together and thought hey, I may be able to use a piece of equipment I built for my custom cabinet business to make something really different to help celebrate. My original idea was to toast the top of a pumpkin pie…
well that was a total fail but… it lead to testing on materials.
I blindly tested bread, denim from an old pair of jeans, cardboard… just about anything I could find laying around the house. Of course I had no idea that this would lead to a new style of western art.
One thing I had was a small piece of deer hide that I have had since I was a little kid. I put this small scrap of hide into my equipment and hit go and the results were an ash filled, stinky mess. A complete DISAPPOINTING example of an epic fail!!!!!
So I threw the test piece in the corner and forgot about it. After a couple of days passed and the turkey hangover ebbed I started to clean up the mess from testing. I found the hide piece and started to gently “dust off” the soot and ash and what I saw blew my mind. It was a perfect brand under all the detritus. After a good cleaning I was surpirsed to find that not only was the brand perfect but the burnt smell had almost completely disappeared.
From there I began to study how best to turn this test into something AWESOME!
This is far more art than science. It took months to develop a reliable process to make even the most simple design brand consistently. After the R&D stage, the designing of the perfect frame took center stage. Finding the right material and designing a simple but strong frame was a challenge since I come from a very precise cabinet building background. After learning to embrace imperfection the rest was pretty simple.
Now we’re expanding into flasks, coaster and a variety of other things.