Pyrography Poppies

Hi all,
Despite being a busy week I managed to finish the poppy project that I was doing with my pyrography iron.

I would have liked to say that I was pleased with the result, but it was not as easy as I thought it would be after doing the initial sketch and transferring it to the wood. If there was a lesson to be leaned here it was that the initial drawing wasn't good enough and I should have sussed that out before I began burning. I followed the drawing exactly, but the flowers just didn't look right. The specific areas I'm talking about are the bits below the seed heads on both flowers. They don't look too bad in the sketch, but once I had burnt them in they didn't look right at all.

We all know that mistakes made in pyrography can't be undone, So what did I do?

 

Well if we take flower one, I managed to alter some of the shading and it sorted the issue out. However, the flower at the back was a bigger problem because there were some burn lines that even the darkest shading wouldn't hide.

 

I had no option but to try and remove the burn lines, which was going to be difficult because the image had been burn into a piece of veneer which was only 0.6mm thick. I have a set of Exacto craft knife blades and I used a couple of those to carefully scrape away the burn lines in the veneer. I took my time to ensure I didn't dig too deep and go through the veneer, and then sanded the area with a piece of 600 grit sandpaper.

 

It took several attempts at the scraping and then sanding to eradicate the marks, but eventually I won. I then did a bit of re shading to change the shape of the petals and all was well in the world of poppy petals.

 

The only issue I had now was the stalk on the flower at the front which didn't seem to be in the right place and it jarred my eye. Getting rid of this was going to be more difficult because it was burnt into an area that wasn't going to be shaded so I couldn't hide it easily.

 

In the end, I decided to move the stem and disguise the line going through it by making the stem look hairy. This left me with another line which needed to go, so I incorporated it into one of the grass blades that I decided to add to complete the cover up. As it happens, I think that the blades of grass improve the overall composition quite well.

 

When I was completely happy with the image, I gave it three coats of varnish and framed it. I then took a photo of it and stuck it up for sale on Folksy. Here is the finished article.

The moral of the story is this. Even if you do make a mistake with your pyrography iron, you always have at least two choices.
Option one.
Use a craft knife blade to scrape away the offending pyrography mark.
Option two
Modify your design to incorporate and or hide your mistake.

I have no idea what I will be working on next, so we can all have a surprise.