Damselflies Complete

In my last post I left you with a sketch of a damselfly pyrography image that I was working on and hinted that I was going use a bit of colour

Below you can see the finished product and I'm very pleased with the way it turned out.

After using my pyrography iron to burn the images onto the wooden plaque, I used a light wash of white watercolour paint to give the wings of each damselfly a transparrent look.

In the next step, it would be easy to just paint the body of the damselfly blue. However, if I did that, the colour would appear very flat. To avoid that and get the colour to shine, I always use a little white gesso for undercoat. Once that was dry, I could then paint over it with a blue acrylic. Unfortuatly, the computer based image doesn't do justice to how it looks in real life, but we shouldn't moan too much because the technology is brillliant.

The last thing I did was give the whole thing 3 coats of varnish for protection and to enhance the work.

A word of warning here; if you are going to use water colour in any of your pyrography projects.Varnish comes in two versions; one is liquid in a tin that needs to be applied with a brush and the second comes in a spray can.  When you use watercolor paints, always use spray varnish because if you don't the paint will smudge when you brush the varnish on. And you don't want that I can assure you.

Now then, those who have followed my posts will already know that my other half is very artistic and pretty damn crafty. She has done some beautiful paintings which you can see by clicking on the following link  http://www.nosam45.freeserve.co.uk/. She has also made some classy cards and decorated some fantastic boxes. However, having seen me burning away quite contentedly, with my pyrography iron, she decided she wanted to have a go.

In my next post I will show you how she got on.