Wood-burning 101: Pyrography & the Butt-Ugly Panel

In past posts, I've given some attention to how surface imperfections and flaws need to be planned for. It is both an aggravation and an attraction for the pyrographic artist. A pyrographer often must affect a more conscious relationship with wood than many artists do their respective mediums. Wood is far more than a canvas. Each piece is as unique as a fingerprint and each brings to our table is own peculiarities in densities, moisture and grain. A pyrographic artist learns quickly to train his hand, and with it the hot tool, to respond to how the wood surface is acting as he works. In planning an image we hope to burn, we often find ourselves with a pyrographic truism: what can't be ignored must be used.

A variety of species tool very well with a woodburner. Bass and poplar will always be personal favorites of mine. Owing to its relative inexpensiveness and that most of my pieces have ended up on furniture items, most of my time has been spent with pine. Generally speaking, pine takes a burner very nicely and usually has accommodating grain features. It can also be nightmarish when it comes to knots and surface defects. These days, when working with pine, I most often let the panel decide what it will become. Nature presents us with certain challenges. Letting our imaginations run rampant with them is precisely part of the magic for the pyrographic artist.
We often find ourselves with panels that are just ugly. This one, for example...


This panel is actually a single board, 4 feet long and with widths as wide as 2. It is just under two inches thick. Both the top and bottom edges are "live edge," meaning that edge had been the exterior surface of the tree. It had bark...and often becomes stunning furniture. This particular panel is destined to become a coffee table. We just have to get it well past its current ugly duckling stage.

The most obvious challenge presented us here are this panel's knots. There are 3 bands of them, right up the middle and on both sides. They are too large and defined to be ignored, so they must be used. Laid out in "bands" as they are, they strike me as just calling out to become trees. I frequently like using knots to this end as they incorporate themselves very readily into such images.
They are not, however, without their issues. Most often, there will be moisture (i.e. dried/drying sap) associated with these knots, even in very seasoned wood. When your burner tip comes into contact with this, the heat draws it to the surface and you will hear it sizzle. Notice the smoke rolling back from my burner here:



Knots and their surrounding surfaces are denser and tend to burn (i.e. darken) more slowly. The melted sap, which caramelizes as we go, helps slow the process even further. The result, incorporating what would be a very intrusive knot into the image itself, is usually worth the added patience.

I've found that using a 25-watt burner to be invaluable. Pine knots can be hard on the more-delicate 20-watt hot tool (my preferred burner). The heavier 25-watt tool not only takes the abuse better but also darkens the surface more quickly in the bargain. In the above picture, this stouter hot tool acquits itself nicely in helping to "form" the knot into the end-grain of a broken tree limb.

With the trees (as good a starting point as any...) established, the picture is taking shape. At this point, the problems which made this panel such an initial challenge, are actually resolved. All that's left is straight-forward pyrography and composition...



(My work companion, wholly unimpressed with the artistic process...)



In bringing things closer to completion, I found myself with an opportunity to truly "paint with fire" ...or at least to use open flame to affect some of the heavier shades along the larger tree trunks.


Such opportunities present themselves very infrequently for me. Flame is an exceedingly unpredictable tool. It's rather like using a broad axe instead of a scalpel. One tends to bite the inside of one's cheek (not that I, uhm, er, ever do...) when taking open flame to a piece in which he's already invested so many hours. It is a gamble. Flame can char too deeply without warning. Occasionally your piece catches fire.

Each piece presents its unique headaches and challenges. Finding their resolution is part of the magic of pyrography. The character of a piece, its knots and defects, inform the vision. Together, they are bound only by the limits of our imaginations...

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...