Pyrography Hare

Hi all,
I'm pleased to tell you that I managed to do a bit of pyrography this week. My oil paints have also arrived along with me 62nd birthday, so be prepared to see my first foray into that medium in a few posts time.

Right, back to the pyrography. While I'm out and about I keep my eyes open for wooden items that could be suitable for some pyrography  treatment and find they come in handy. Earlier in the week, I was looking at a pencil box that I bought and, because of it's long thin shape, I was wondering what I could possible pyrograph onto it.
Anyway, I went back to a drawing of some hares that I'd done a couple of months ago on a big box and decided to use one of them. Obviously, these would be too big for the small pencil box, so I located the file on my computer and removed the hare at the back.

I then re sized the image of the single hare to fit the pencil box I was going to use. After transferring the image, I burnt in the outline with my pyrography iron, but didn't bother with any shading. I'd had in my mind for a while to do something different, so I drew some contour lines on the hare that I thought would loosely describe it's form and burnt them in. To make it stand out on the box, I then gave the hare a coat of  medium oak gloss varnish. I was careful not to put any of the colour on to the hare's eye because I wanted that to provide a highlight. Once oak varnish was dry, the whole box was given two more coats of clear gloss varnish to protect it. Here is the finished article.

I think it looks very good and I have decided to do a larger version on a piece of white beech veneer. I will let you see that in my next post if I get chance to do it.