Wood-burning 101: Pyrography and the Sleeping Fawn

After spending some time with this panel and reviewing its rather pronounced defects, I thought it would prove ideal as a companion piece for my Woodland Morn, #1. Their dimensions (18" x 18" in the end) ) were close enough where they seemed made for each other. These defects provided a unique challenge, as they always do. They helped guide my decisions on what could happen here. What I came up with was something that I feel is straight-forward enough where the weekend hobbyist might have some fun with as well.

I decided that the most dramatic of this panel's surface defects, a dark stripe of heartwood, would incorporate itself nicely into the bark of a fallen tree. With this thought in mind, building this scene around a sleeping fawn seemed a natural progression.

I begin by making a very general sketch in pencil. This is usually as detailed as I tend to go before plugging the burner in. At this stage, I'm mostly focused on getting the more important compositional lines down. Everything else will be sketched and composed with a hot burner.


In composition, pyrography differs from painting in that, generally speaking, a painter will start with the background of a canvas and work forward. He does this to keep the background from "interfering" with what would otherwise be an established foreground. In pyrography it is generally a good idea to begin with the foreground, or at least its most essential points. In this way, we reduce the possibility that we will have burned a solid line straight through where it didn't need to be. It is clear from the opening strokes of this burn that the grain will be a major player in it. Some species assert their grains through a woodburning more noticeably than others. This is a fairly densely-grained pine panel and you'll notice how the burner wants to burn unevenly as it slides over the surface. It will take some control to keep these lines as clean as you'd like.

As mentioned, most of the active "sketching" for this piece will be done with the burner itself. I treat my pencil lines as a frame upon which to "drape" the burn. By this I mean that it is very important that we keep mindful of this direction in which we lay the fur. Fur on an animal follows the underlying musculature and becomes a helpful ally in creating the appearance of this animal's shape. I almost always begin by establishing the most important lines. With the fawn, I try to keep the outside edges as "soft" as possible. I have also very lightly burnt the outlines of the fawn's spots. This can be a little tricky in that it is important that these lines be lighter than the ones that will replace them, lest you be left with dark circles where you'd rather have gentle progression. I find that laying in these spots proves helpful in sketching this fawn. Spots on a fawn generally form on its sides, running from front-to-back, leaving a "spot-free stripe"down the very middle of this youngster's back. With this in mind, these spots provide the artist with wonderful marker points with which to determine your fawn's shape--and the directions its fur will take. At this point, we simply continue working these areas, laying on the fur over what is becoming a more detailed template.

Once I've finished what amounts to a "base coat" for the fur, I switch tips for my shader. Until this point, I've been using a fairly fresh "standard tip." At even a cursory glance, we see that my shading tip is, in fact, a very well-worn standard tip from a burner that died years ago. Its worn surface delivers a "softer" line and doesn't cut in quite as easily. I use the shader on the fur that I've already established, softening and defining the contours of the fawn.





In this pic, I have shaded the lower ends of the fawn and its hip. You can see how the shading helps define the fawn and gives it a more lifelike surface to the eye.













As I mentioned earlier, the grain of this particular panel is fairly aggressive. My philosophy has always been that the idea of working with wood means that we effect a relationship between its surface and the image we are hoping to create. They will always coexist. Sometimes, however, it becomes necessary to help nature along. Here the hard stripes of the grain are quite dense and burn much more slowly than their surrounding material. In laying in this area beneath the fawn's ear, I have found that its "striping" is a bit too aggressive and isn't allowing me to round this area of the fawn's head. "Helping nature" here means to gently and slowly stroke the lighter, denser grain, careful not to darken its surrounding wood, thus easing the contrast and easing the effect.






















In laying in the facial details, such as the eye and nose, I find it helpful to remember that very dark surfaces are rarely uniformly dark. Noses, especially moist ones, like to reflect light, as do the eyes. While this sleeping fawn's eye is largely obscured in this perspective, we achieve a more lifelike appearance by layering its effect and allowling at least some play of light on its surface.









And in such ways, slowly building up the shades and textures, we begin to achieve the image we had hoped to conjure here...