Another Pyrography Pen

Hi all,
In my last post I said that there were two main issues when it came to doing pyrography. The first was the need to buy a good pyrography machine, which I covered last week. Today, I would like to talk about the next big issue when it comes to pyrography.

It is a bit difficult to explain, but it comes down to the balance between light and dark. Those of you who are thinking of taking up pyrography and perhaps a lot of people who have been doing it for a while need to consider how they see the balance of light and darks.

Ask yourself what it was that bought you to like pyrography in the first place, then google images of pyrography. There is some lovely stuff out there, but there are lots of other items that could be so much better.  Take a look, and noting the amount of dark and light wood on the images, decide if you like one type more than the other.

I'm not having a go at other people's pyrography because  you will find that I have a few things on there myself that could be better. I was a line burner for quite a while before the penny dropped. I think that when one takes up pyrography, the delight that comes from burning lines into wood is enough, at least to begin with. After that comes a desire to do a bit of shading and because the results are pleasing a lot of people who practise pyrography stop there.

Let me show you one of my early efforts.

Here we have an image of a mouse chewing a piece of corn with some grasses in the background. I nice enough image even if I do say so myself, but it is lacking something. Can you see that it is just burnt lines on a piece of wood. To be honest I could have done the same with a sepia coloured pen.
Now consider this image.

It's better, the butterflies are nice and dark, but there is little in the way of shading on the leaves. I guess I was scared of spoiling something that looked good, so I finished up with something nice that could have been stunning. If I was to do this image again I would have done more shading on the leaves, trying to find a better balance between light and dark so that the leaves popped out without destroying the contrast with the butterflies.
Here is another image.

It consists of some daisies on  a very dark background.  It was done to be a clock for our kitchen, but can you see how the dark background makes the daisies pop out. Just imagine how it would look if I just burnt around the image as in the mouse example above, would it look as good? I think not.

Anyway, it might be just down to personal opinion, but to me pyrography images that have a larger percentage of burnt wood look much better to me. If you like have just lines burnt into wood then carry on with your style, but if you would like to try a darker style I will be talking more about it in my next post.
For now I will leave you with a picture of my latest pyrography pen, which follows my suggestion that darker images are better images when it comes to pyrography.

 I hope you like it, in my next post I will describe how I burn this type of image and give you some tips. If you have any thoughts about what I have said in this post please let me know, I'd love to have your opinion.