Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello. Welcome to the wonderful
world of wood burning. My name is Crystal, and I'm a wood burning
artist and teacher. I have made it my goal to
introduce as many people as possible to the wonderful
world of pyrography, also known as wood burning, in a fun and relaxing
environment. Many of my students
who've told me, and I agree with them, that wood burning
is like meditating. It's very satisfying,
very grounding, and often you will
find yourself lost in the tactile sensations
of the whole process, for the rest of the
world just fades away. In this class, you
will learn how to create a functional work
of art with pyrography, while we create a
woodsy landscape scene on a charcuterie board. We will start by going
over the tools and materials that will be
needed for this class. Then we will spend a little time talking
about wood burning safety since pyrography does
have a few inherent dangers. After that, you will
learn and practice some pyrography techniques
on a piece of scrap wood. Once you've spent a little time practicing your techniques, then you will get started
on our class project. You will learn how to transfer a pre-printed design
onto a piece of wood using graphite
transfer paper. Then you will get to burn trees, mountains, and other landscape features onto your
piece of wood. Last of all, I'll
show you how to finish and protect
your wood with conditioning oil so that you can proudly display it and
use it in your home, or give it as a gift. Throughout the class,
I'll also be showing you some alternative ways to accomplish what we
will be doing with some tips and tricks that
I've learned along the way. My hope is that you will be able to take the
skills that you'll learn in this class and apply them to many other future
wood burning projects. Now, let's go over the supplies that you
will need for this class.
2. Supplies: Let's go over the supplies that we will be using
for this class. Starting with the piece
of wood that we will use. For this project, I'm using a seven-inch by 11-inch
piece of cherry. You can use other types of
woods such as basswood, walnut, aspen, or other
lovely wood that you choose. Just make sure that
it is unfinished, without stains or chemicals
or other treatments. Make sure that it
is well sanded. I like to sand my board
with 100 grit to start and then 220 or 320 grit sandpaper to make a final smooth
surface to burn on. Your piece of scrap wood that you'll be using to practice
your techniques on. Some sandpaper, fine
grit for removing any stubborn graphite
lines or pencil lines. You'll want to make sure
you have a embossing tool or some ballpoint pen or
pencil is fine as well. Some washi tape or masking tape, your design printed
on a piece of paper. You can download the
printable design from the class resources below. Piece of graphite paper that we'll be using to
transfer the design. If you don't have graphite paper or you're unable to get it, there are a couple of
alternative ways to transfer your design that I'll show you later
in the class. A soft cloth and some
wood conditioning oil to finish the piece when we are done and make it
ready to be used. Now, let's talk about
our wood-burning tool. For this project, we
are going to be using the Walnut Hollow
creative versa tool. It has an adjustable
temperature control. You do not need to have an
adjustable temperature tool, but that is what
we're using today. The tip that we're
going to use for this project will also be this, what we call the universal tip. I like to use the universal tip because it is universal.
It's versatile. You can use it for shading
and for making lines, all of which we will
talk about in the class. But first, a word about
wood-burning safety.
3. Wood Burning Safety: Let's talk about
wood-burning safety. As always, read and follow your tools manufacturer's
guidelines. The smoke from
wood-burning can be irritating to your eyes, nose, and lungs, so make
sure that you're working in a
well-ventilated space. I also like to use
a fan positioned so that it is pulling air
away from the workspace. For even more protection, you can wear a mask. Remember that this part of
the tool gets extremely hot and you want to keep
that away from skin, hair, clothing, work
surfaces, as best you can. But these tools come with
this little stand here and all I do is just tape
it to my work surface. Then that secures it so that
when you put the tool down, it stays there and it
doesn't fall off the table. When the tool is not in use, make sure that you shut it off, unplug it, and put it away. Keep it out of reach
of children and pets. Before you start to wood-burn, make sure that you
are working on a hard surface, not your lap, not your couch, but
a surface on which you can tape this stand and
keep it nice and solid. Up next. Let's get some practice using
your pyrography tool.
4. Practice Using Your Pyrography Tool: Now that you've gathered
all your supplies and you know how to stay
safe while wood-burning, let's turn on that tool, warm it up, and do
some practicing. Once you have your
workspace all set up, go ahead and plug in and turn
on your wood-burning tool. The creative versa tool turns on with this little dial here. You can hear it click
on and click off. You turn it on and rotate that dial all the way to
the highest temperature. If you'd like, you can go
with lower temperatures, but we will start out our project at the
high temperature. This tool takes a
good 5-10 minutes to get hot enough to burn wood. Before we get started
on the final project, it's always a good idea
to take a few minutes to practice using your tool
on a piece of scrap wood. I always keep a piece
of scrap wood next to my project so that I can just make sure my tool is hot enough or to practice a new
technique I want to try, to see if it's too hot for the certain thing
I'm about to do. I would like you to
do before you start this project is just
take a minute and practice just dragging that
tool with the knife edge. Just seeing how you
can get some lines. You can cut nice
straight lines with that what I call the
knife's edge of the tool. Just make sure that your
pressure is very light and even. If you want something
to burn darker, don't push in to
the wood like that. Because then you
will find you get these deep grooves in your wood. Just slow down your burn. Instead of going super fast
and getting a nice thin line, I'm going to just
slow down a little. My line gets darker
as I go slower, and then just practice
doing some curves. You're taking the tip of that tool and just
dragging it towards you, light touch like flowing
over the wood as you go. Take a few minutes to practice shading with the flat
edge of this tool, and just try holding it at different angles and
see what happens. You can work with the very
tip of the flat edge and make some nice little shading marks. You'll find that it
flows pretty well over the wood and you can
get actually get some decent lines out of that. You can tilt the
tool down a little more and you'll get some
wider shading lines. Just get a feel for that, and really it's just
a matter of letting the weight of the tool
guide your pressure. You don't want to be
pushing really hard. Most beginner wood burners, their biggest trouble is that they are
pushing really hard and it takes practice to make
nice smooth straight lines, but that's why we're doing this so that we can get practice. When you feel like
you've got a good, decent feel for your tool, let's just go ahead
and get started on the project and you will learn more of these
techniques as we go along. In the next section, you will learn how to
transfer a preprinted design onto your piece of wood using
graphite transfer paper.
5. Transfer a Design onto Wood: Now that you've spent time practicing and you've gotten
comfortable with your tool, let's go ahead and transfer a design on
to your project piece. But first I will
show you a couple of alternatives to
using graphite paper in case you don't have it. One alternative is to flip over your design and take
a soft-ish pencil, a Number 2 pencil
works just fine, and just scribble over the
back of the entire piece. Just make sure that
the entire design has scribbling behind it. Then you can place
it on your piece of wood and trace it with
your embossing tool, a pencil or a ballpoint pen. Another method is to use heat to transfer a printed design
on to your wood as well. You can use a household iron set on the lowest temperature so that it won't
burn everything. I like to use this heat transfer
tip on my walnut hollow. You will just turn your
pre-printed design upside down. If it's important which
direction it faces you'll want to reverse the design before you print it but in this case it doesn't
really matter, so just flip it over. I will secure it with washi tape just
like I would if I was transferring
with transfer paper. Then go ahead and just
take that tool on a low temperature and just basically iron your
design onto the wood. Now, let's go through
all the steps of transferring your design
with graphite paper. Just position your piece of
paper where you want it, where you want the design to be. I'm somewhere close to the
middle and position to level and then take
your washi tape and secure that to the board. Then you'll take
your graphite paper and you'll put the shiny
side down, dull side up. This piece of graphite
paper that you have can be used multiple
times in multiple projects, so save that graphite
paper when you're done. We'll start by transferring the design using a gentle touch. It's what this tool is
for, it's embossing tool. All we're going to do
is we're going to trace the main outlines
of the mountains. I try to do this in a
methodical manner so that I don't leave anything out. For example, I'm
going through and I'm just tracing all of the tops of the triangles first as far as they'll go down. Take a break for a second once you've done a few lines and see if you like how
dark your lines are. I feel like this is dark
enough for me to see. If it's not dark enough you want to increase your pressure, if they're really dark then you should probably
decrease your pressure. You don't want your
lines to be so dark, you can remove them
later if needed. I'll just finish tracing. Just draw a couple of things
before I speed up the video is don't be too worried about
getting the lines exact, I'm definitely not doing that. No need to trace
these shading lines. You don't need to fill in
the trees but if you want, go ahead and trace the trees if you want them
to look exactly like this. There's that example or I'm going to go all the way
down so we don't forget. Or just draw a line right
down the center of the tree. I'll do that and show
you the two ways that we can burn these so you can trace them or you can just draw
a line down the center. For these trees in the
background I would just draw little lines. Or if you're going to
draw anything at all they can be done freehand
quite easily. We're just going to
go through, I want to speed up the video while we trace the rest of this. Once you have your
design all traced, go ahead and pull out
your paper, double-check, make sure you got
all the lines you wanted traced on here. Don't worry if you
miss a couple, they're easy to just burn in using this picture
as a reference. We'll just pull that off
and we're ready to burn. See you in the next video. Up next, we will start
by burning the trees.
6. Burn the Trees: You've gathered
all your supplies, you've set up your workspace, you've spend some
time practicing, and you've got a design
transferred onto a piece of wood. Now, let's get started
burning the trees. Hopefully you have spent some time playing on
your practice wood, once your tool is hot, just getting a feel for
what it's like to burn. How to get that smooth texture
or that smooth burn line. Remember it's a light touch, nice and slow, take your time, don't be in a rush, and you'll be able to just
trace the lines as we go. When I'm burning a landscape, I like to start
with the trees in the foreground because
they're going to be the darkest part of the project, and then I will build
the project backwards because we don't want to
have to burn over anything. You can burn over things, but if I put in
these mountain lines first and then I add the
tree over the top of that, sometimes those burn lines will start to show
through from behind. That's why I like to start
with the foreground. We'll just start by
filling in these trees. Remember I'm using
that light touch, gliding over my board,
doing small strokes. This is an example of a
tree where we outlined it. We're just going to fill
in those outlined section, those outlined shapes to get that nice and
dark foreground tree. If you find yourself, your tool is catching on
the grain of the wood and creating a harsh places
where the tool bumps, then you need to go
ahead and lighten your touch a little bit
and don't push as hard. Just go slow. If you're
finding that you are not burning enough, then maybe increase your
pressure a little bit. But usually most people
when they're doing this, they tend to push too hard. We want to get that
nice light touch. You can always add in
texture if you want, but to just get that gliding
motion over the board, it's a light touch
and a slow motion. I'm letting my tool create some texture
here as we go along. This is not a
completely smooth burn, but that's because
I want the tree. It's a tree and
trees have texture , that is why I'm adding. I'm adding my texture
with the burner, creating lumps and bumps
a little bit in the wood, rather than trying to shade different levels to create
the illusion of texture. It's just a personal choice, I feel like this is a more
accessible way to get texture. We will speed up the video
for the second tree, and then we'll meet you
back for the lines, how to build a tree when you start with just
lines penciled in. If you went ahead and
traced all of your trees, just go ahead and finish burning and you can skip the next part. There's your two
filled in trees, and now I'm just going to show you how you
can build a tree from these two lines right here. Build two trees from
these two lines. Just start at the top. I'm going to do this one
first because I want it to be in front of this
other little one. They are close together so their branches will intertwine. I just start at the top and start creating
little squiggly lines, starting with just one
little downstroke, tiny little dot there, and then as I go down, it's almost like I'm
making a zigzag here. You can see the zigzag
pattern going on. But each time I go across, I'm getting slightly wider. This is just your
basic framework. Then you can go in and add some body to the
middle of the tree, add some thickness
down the trunk. You can see I'm not really
drawing in a trunk at all, I'm just drawing in
the branches and then the illusion of a trunk
based on the fact that their branches are
thicker down there. You can see this is a faster definitely
freehand way of creating a tree that's more random
looking and uneven, which is more like
an actual tree. That builds pretty quickly. Then the second tree which is a little bit
behind that tree, it doesn't take quite as
long so we're just going to fill in the gaps with it. We're still doing
this zigzaggy thing, but whenever we
get to this tree, we just pretend those
branches there, we don't actually burn
those branches in. I'm just going to
fill it in so it gets a little bit darker here where it overlaps
with the other trees, and then just fill
in those gaps. Since there's two
trees, two, three, maybe even four
trees back there, I can say it fills it in. If I wanted to, just for fun, I could add another
little tree top here. You can play with these trees, you can add, takeaway, have fun. Up next, we will burn the
foreground landscape.
7. Burn the Foreground Landscape: You've learned so much already. You know how to burn safely, you know how to set
up a workspace, practice using your tool, you learned how to
transfer a design, you've burned some trees, now we're going to burn
the foreground landscape. Next we'll do this
foreground lines, creating that Earth that
these trees are resting in. You can use the
same technique with the very flat edge of the tip in getting
that lighter burn line, or you can go ahead and use what I call the cutting
edge of this tool and just cut into the
wood along that line. That creates a fun
little texture that adds texture and
depth to your design. I'm just going to follow this and do the same thing on
this one. I'll start here. This is a style choice, I'm not burning on the
side of the board. I'm just going down into the
side a little bit there, so I'm just following my line. It's okay if you
don't get it exact. This is where I'm
choosing this stop. Before you get to
this curved edge, you could stop on
the curved edge. You can go all the
way over if you want. That's just how I'm doing it. Again, I got off my graphite line there
but we can fix that, and we can erase that graphite rather than
try to burn differently. There's my foreground lines, and then we're going to do
these background trees here. These trees are further
away than these trees, so we want them to be
not quite as dark. This is very quick
motion; very light, very quick, just back and
forth on these trees. If you feel like
you can't burn fast enough to just do
this light touch, go ahead and turn
it all down if you can and we have one that
has a variable temperature. I'm just going in through
those lines I put in there and creating
these lighter trees. These are just little trees pointing on different
directions, they don't have to be
perfectly straight. It's like an old line of
trees in the background, so you don't need
it to be straight. You can add just some
lines in just to create that idea of trees
behind this line here, not on the line but behind it. There's that, and then we
want to add in some shadow. Just a real quick, if
you take a look at this picture you'll see that my light source is
coming from this direction,. All of these sides of the
mountains are lit up, all these sides have shadows, so I want to put shadows on
these sides of the trees. I sketched in those
little lines there, and really all you need to do is just glide over and just
create some shadow there. We've got a nice tall tree, so I created a tall shadow. I could make it a
little darker here, so there's my tree and shadow. Pretty basic, same
thing on this side. Just some lines for shadow, that gives an illusion of shadows on this
side of the trees. Then here we have some grass, and the way I've put
in grass is I start at the base and I come up. I'm just lifting the tool, pretending like it's
a plane; taking off. In this case the plane
is just taking off. It's starting already on the
ground and it's taking up, so we're not doing any landings today on this when we do grass. We start with the plane
already on the ground. I'm going to just burn up. Then that way the [NOISE] lines get lighter as you
go towards the top, because I'm lifting up my tool. [NOISE] There you go. There's some little
grass I can add. If you want to go through
and just play with it, maybe add some grass
in some other places; maybe a little grass on this side to even it
out a little bit. I have to turn it upside down, it can't be that right side up; not quite coordinated enough. Grass growing in
front of my trees. Next is the mountain lines.
8. Burn the Mountains: That was a lot to learn. You know, how to
transfer your design, you know how to do lines,
squiggles, shading. Now you're way more
comfortable with your wood-burning tool and we are going to burn
some mountains. First, we'll start
with just tracing all those lines that we
penciled in and just move your wood around
as needed to be able to control your tool the
best way you know how. Nice. We've already talked
about how to create these nice lines with pressing a light touch and that lifting, landing, and takeoff. We do these shortstop
easy strokes. You can have more control over what's going on with your pen. I can follow my graphite
lines better if I'm doing short strokes. I'm just going
through and I'm just going to trace all these lines. I'll speed up the video
as we get through this part and then after
all the lines are traced, we will go through the shading. All the lines are traced. Now we're going to go in
and put in the shadows. If we use our little
drawing here, the way that I have these
shadows drawn in is with just a bunch of
almost parallel lines. I will show you how I did that
with my wood-burning tool. I'll just start at the top
and you can see already I've had a little bit of a spot
where I made this thicker. Not a big deal we're just going to come through and we're just going to keep going
with these lines. This is a shading method. Just creating lines that are different lengths
closer together where you want it
to be darker and further apart where you
want it to be lighter. In this case, I'm
just filling in all these areas where I see lines on my design. Creates this loose shadowy feel because you don't necessarily
want it to be solid, dark black all the way through. There I'm just adding some texture and then I'm going through in some
places and I thought, well, some of it need some
additional areas to create that line texture
just to give it a little more depth to make this look more like it's a little mountain section there. This one here, it
didn't have any, but if I wanted to, I could add a little
bit right there. Mountains are in the background, here you want to keep
them just a little bit lighter than these dark
trees in the foreground. That's how you
create that illusion of something being faraway. Make it a little bit lighter. That piece is done if
you want to be done. If you look at it and you think, I want more of
something in here, like this blank space here, you can add some more
little mountain, some hills and I'll show
you how to do something. Do that freehand in case
you want to do that. I like this. I like the way the wood texture changes
color through here. Normally I wouldn't
fill this in, but I'm going to do
it so I can show you guys how to do it. You can take a pencil and sketch in something that
you think might work so, like that and like
that if you want. Then you can say, I don't
like how that looks, you can erase it. You can draw right on the board. As long as you keep a really light touch
with that pencil, you're not going
to ruin your wood. Let's see, maybe I want it here. I think that works. That
works a little bit. Maybe just go all the way. Maybe create another
little bit right there. If you want, I
think I like that. I can do that and
that helps me see what I'm doing and
then I'll just come back through and just go
right over my pencil lines. Again using that
short light strokes. But this project is finished. We're finished
with the burning. Now all we have left are
the finishing touches. We will clean it up, remove any leftover graphite, or pencil lines and
then we will apply our finishing oil to protect
it and get it ready to use.
9. Finishing Touches: For the final step
in your project, you're just going to take your fine-grit
sandpaper and remove any graphite lines
that you didn't burn over that are
still showing through. Then you just take that with lightly sand until
the lines go away. You're standing with
the grain of the wood. Just a light sanding, go over the whole
project if you want to give it a little cleanup. Once you've done that, you might find that you
have sand dust down in the cracks or down into
the textures. That's okay. That's all cleaned up and then you can use your soft cloth to clean off the sandpaper
dust that's left behind. Then I like to apply my wood
conditioner with my fingers. They're already
had open and start applying with my fingers. I just scoop in, I just rub it on. Scoop it with my fingers, rub it on, I get it all over. Every bit of the way, get down in here and
get around the edges. I get on the back. Skip that will rubbed in. If you don't want to
use your fingers, you can use your soft cloth, but then you'll need another
cloth for the final phase. I've gotten my oil all
rubbed in everywhere. Then I'm going to take my
cloth and I'm just going to do the final, just going to push that
oil into the woods. Nice. I'm just rubbing it down with that
cloth and that oil. Any excess oil wiped off, soak the extra oil into
the world a little better. Then once you've done that, your project is done. To care for your cutting board, make sure that you keep
it out of the dishwasher. Never put it in a dishwasher, wash it with soap and water. Don't soak it in water. Just do a quick rinse or a
quick wipe down the damp cloth and then make sure
that you dry it standing on the long edge, not flat like this and
not with the end grain down because you'll find
that the water can be whipped up into the wood and
it can cause it to split.
10. Final Thoughts: Congratulations. You did it. You created your own
functional piece of wood-burning art that
you can probably display and use in your
home or give it as a gift. But even if you didn't make, it took her to report and you just used some random
piece of wood. I would really love to
see what you've made, so please share it in the
project section below. Thank you so much for
creating with me today. If you want to know more about pyrography and get more
wood-burning inspiration. Here are some of the places
where you can find me.
Crystal Bailar, Artist - Teacher Mosstangle Arts
