Pyrography Fairy

Hi All,
 In my last post I shared with you my progress so far on a pyrography picture I was doing of a fairy. I have included the picture here to save you looking back at the previous post.

 

  

Anyway, in my last post I said that it looked a bit lifeless and that it needed to be brought to life. Well hopefully, I have done that through the use of what I call contours. They are the lines that join places of equal height on a map and are similar to the swirls that are seen on a weather map especially when there is lots of low pressure about.

  

In actual fact, the idea to use these contour lines came from the need to add an extra dimension to some trinket pots that I used to do. If you look at the picture below you can see that I have followed the natural grain of the wood and it produces a lovely effect.

I could have followed the grain of the wood on my fairy picture, but there was one problem. The grain in the fairy picture was horizontal and that wouldn't have the right effect because I wanted the contours to create an impression of growth like trees.

 

So the only thing I could do was make it up. I took my pencil and drew hundreds of lines on the picture and then burnt them in with my pyrography iron.This was a painstaking piece of work literally because it gave my carpal tunnel syndrome some gyp. I had to have frequent breaks but that wasn't too bad because I got a bit more work done on my next book. By the way, all the pyrography work in this picture was done with a spoon tip. Below is a picture of the fairy with the contour lines included. I think it is a great improvement.

 

It had always been my intention to paint some of the items in the picture with watercolour paints. I'm going to start with the mushrooms and the fairy and then see how it looks. I know that some pyrography purists don't like to use paint on their pyrography work, but hell, life's to short too be bound by barriers of you own making. It is the image that counts so why shouldn't paint be used if it improves your pyrography creation.

 

The painting process is underway and you can judge whether or not it improves this picture in my next post. Meanwhile, if you have any thoughts on using paint in pyrography I'd love to hear from you.