Painting With Fire: 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.