Pyrography

Watermill Pyrography is a beautiful scene of a Watermill which have been around for about 2,000 years to help grind grain into flour. Inspired by a pattern, the image was sized to fit on to the 9″ x 7″ piece of Italian poplar and has been with polyacrylic to protect. You can see the progression of the work in the images below. This wood-burning took several days to complete as I spend 2-3 hours at a time working on it as the depth and shadows needed to stand out to give it dimension. When it comes to wood-burning, there are times when outlining your work matters and is a key element, for example being the building and wood planks. In other sections, it’s more important…

I just released the Sleeping Dragon Wood-Burning Pattern and I am excited on how it turned out. I don’t consider myself the best pencil-drawing artist, but I think I can manage the line art for a pattern. I love dragons and when I looked at the piece of hickory, I thought it would make a create wood-canvas for a sleeping dragon. I didn’t want to just have a dragon on this piece, I envisioned a whole scene that you may see if you were to walk upon a dragon in a cave. I thought to incorporate some of the natural grain colors would help bring this idea together. I always love it when you can blend art with nature in a way that just seems…

The Lion Pride Wood-Burning is a beautiful scene of a lion family wood-burned on wood with stained frame. But I want to talk about how it all came together. As you can see here, I didn’t make the graphite lines light. IN fact, I left them dark on purpose so that I would burn darker. This has been a theme for me because I used to burn too light which in essence can make your wood-burning piece fada a lot faster. Once the pattern was traced, I started with the king of the jungle as getting him in place and wood-burned would be the guide for the entire lion pride wood-burning. This first lion cub didn’t quite turn out as I had hoped. I actually…

The horse pyrography turned out really well but did present a few challenges I want to go over. When working with wood and burning dark, creating contrast is important or everything is just going to blend together. As with all of my wood-burning projects, I use the tracing method to transfer all my patterns. It can be a bit time consuming but it’s easy, inexpensive and gives me more control of what to include. Once the pattern is printed, I tape the pattern to the piece of wood to eliminate movement and I can check what I did or didn’t trace. Once it’s taped, I lay down the graphite paper and begin tracing the pattern with my stylus.   I started with the fence to lay…

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to see Black Plague – a band I interviewed for The Rebels Den not too long ago. Shortly after, I was commissioned to do a wood-burning but it was a bit of a secret and I only released snippets here and there on what I was working on which looked something like this: Part of the challenge was trying to figure out how to approach the feathers – and I ended up using two different techniques. As you can see here, I first burned the feathers and then my handy dandy knife and I had a bit of fun. But I still couldn’t show it off – and here I was just doing some detailing and finishing before…

Every now and then when I do some image searches for reference I come across royalty free images such as this Moose. The face of the moose drew me in and I felt like I had to wood-burn this guy. Like I mean look at him, he’s so stinking cute! And if you have a thing for animals, you look into what they stand for and what their symbolism is. Don’t sweat it, that’s the motto of the moose. It’s a tactic to conserve heat, and precisely why moose thrive so well in cold environments. Symbolically, this is a way of saying “stay cool” under pressure. So who is John Frederick Miller? John Frederick Miller (1759–1796) was an English illustrator, mainly of botanical subjects. Miller…