Bio of a Wood-burning:" Portland Waterfront, 1901," Day 2

What is often a daunting element for a pyrographer, when working on such a large piece, is that after several hours have been invested, so little appears to have been accomplished. I frequently find myself stepping back at the end of a work session, shaking my head and wondering what I'd done to swallow those hours. Most often, it is the piece I'm working on playing its mind-game on me. After six of seven hours' work, we expect to see more palpable progress, great swaths of wood burned under, and often as not this won't be the case.

Pyrography can be slow in its application, and especially when we are executing a highly-detailed burning, such as Portland Waterfront, 1901, a great deal of time will be spent on a comparatively small surface space. This can often only be appreciated at the end of the project, when all those elements in which we've invested so much time suddenly seem to snap together. Those are the moments that can make this craft so addictive: that warm little high we feel at the conclusion of the matter, sitting back and feeling it was all worth it in the end.

I have always been very fond of this theme because of it being such a busy scene, with figures ranging in size from smaller than a pencil lead to stepping through the extreme foreground and out of frame, too large to depict in full and achieve the desired effect. Today I've opted to start with some of the intermediate figures along the left-hand side of the street.



Keeping the pencil lines to a minimum, I'll lay out the figures in their proper perspective, then get busy with the burner. I'll cut the pencil lines first, then begin to draw the subjects in.



I take an important cue from the impressionist painters, in that when depicting figures, especially those at some distance, our eyes no longer pick up the finer details but rather how light, shadow, and color interact. The details become more general. While we may not fret too much about a color spectrum, dealing as we are in a monochromatic medium, that medium itself poses a distinct challenge to the pyrographic artist: with so much going on in a burn like this, and only a fairly narrow palette of shades to pull them off, keeping the figures from getting swallowed into their surroundings will require constant vigilance as this burn progresses.


Excepting any touch-ups that will announce themselves later, we've now established these figures by simply building shades up from bare-bones lines.

At the end of the evening's work-session, I've laid in the fascade of the left-hand buildings and spent a good deal of time shading it. I've established the first of a series of "events" (in this case, the pedestrians on that length of sidewalk and the horse-drawn carriage as it passes.) I have also begun cutting in the buildings and merchant ships on the right-hand side of the street. While I am very aware that much got accomplished tonight, it's proving to be one of those occasions when it just doesn't look it.


And the craziness hasn't even started...

Bio of a Wood-burning: Portland Waterfront, 1901, Day 1

I am dedicating this series of posts to my Mom.

A few years back, when I relocated back to this area, I stayed with my folks for the first several months. I worked second shift at a top-flight wood-working operation, the Duratherm Window Corp. in North Vassalboro. Through the work-weeks especially, they'd be gone by the time I got up, not getting home until after I'd left for work. Entire weeks went by and we'd not see each other, living under the same roof.

I had established a work-corner in my mom's garage and one of my projects that first summer was a version of "Portland Waterfront, 1901". My mother commented to me back then that the only way she was keeping track of me was by checking the progress of that burn when she got home from work. In such a way, the wood-burning seemed to form incrementally each day...rather like these "Bio of a Wood-Burning" posts, which I began with Marilyn a few weeks ago. The experience that summer is precisely what inspired me to do the Bio of a Wood-burning series. It seemed a fun experiment as well as offering a wonderful platform from which to share how to do these burns (the question most frequently asked of me). I'm geneally just flattered that they're interested.

So, yeah, I just have to dedicate this next series of posts to my mother, Simone.



One of the good things about being home as much as I have been of late, is that I occasionally "vacation" from my workspace downstairs to the much-cushier surroundings in our apartment. This piece, you'll notice, is quite large, 25" x 38". It will also prove to be an exercise in intense detail.

Portland Waterfront, 1901 is a theme I've returned to repeatedly for more than a decade. I love the image of a very real place (Commercial Street, Portland, ME) in an era when change was very much in the air, much like the wooden ships whose bowsprits would cross over the street when they were docked, coming only within a few feet of power-lines that had only so recently been strung. It is the very image of a busy Yankee seaport at the dawn of a new era.

In seeming contrast to my oft-stated preference for keeping my pre-sketching to a minimum and composing with the hot tool, this burning requires a lot of pencil work and prep. It is a very busy scene with much happening in every corner and contains so many complex angles and minutiae that it needs to be right on the first pass or the effect of the whole bloody burning can be ruined.


In actuality, I have kept my pencil-work to a minimum--but with so much going on, it just doesn't appear so. Most of the first day's session has been spent in lay-out. Over the next few days, these pencil lines will become a street scene representing more than two city blocks...circa 1901. In the three-ish hours I've already invested with my pencil and steel ruler, I have left most of the finer details and all of the closer ones out. As I work closer to an area, I'll compose as I go. I have found this to be invaluable as it leaves me plenty of time to get creative as I go. Sometimes the best ideas hit you only seconds before the burner hits the wood.


For some unknown reason, I pretty much always start this burn with the left-hand wall. It seems as good a place as any, I expect. I generally cut the bricks with the burner-tip, leaving a decent, but still fairly shallow burnline. In doing bricks, I've usually kept to a 4-step process. First, burn the outline; second, shade each brick to "desired texture." I then lightly shade the whole fascade, which knocks back the as-yet-burned "mortar" between the bricks and establishes the main shadows. The last step I save for later, one of the final stages of the burn itself, which is to tighten everything up once the burn is all but completed (and we have a clearer perspective of what we've actually accomplished.


At the end of this first day's work, better than 7 hours, I'm satisfied that we're off to a good start. The work is sketched out and the burn begun in earnest.

But we've still got a long ways to go...