Some wood burning, pyrography fun

I have a number of trees in my backyard, enough that the yard is often bereft of sunlight. It's murder on the grass.

One of the side-effects of having trees is that branches often fall. Sometimes I burn them, but after a couple good storms I find that I often have a lot of fallen branches. Really. A lot. At one point I decided that I didn't want to just burn them (I was getting bored hanging around outside keeping a fire going).

Some of the branches were very long; with a few I've started to carve out a walking stick, like this one:

With some smaller pieces I've tried to teach myself carving and whittling. I ended up with this little Santa at one point.

The most fun for me, however, has been in cutting out disks and drawing designs on them. I ended up buying a smallish wood burning pen. It has a number of replaceable tips but, most importantly, it has a gauge to raise or lower the temperature:

Through trial and error (lots of trial and error) I've discovered that it isn't possible to sand down the surfaces of the disks too much. Smooth. Smooooooth. Smooth is how they must be.

With a smooth surface it becomes easy to draw a design on the disk and then, with a light, gentle hand, slowly burn over the design with a round wood burning pen. Slow is the name of the game with this, and very very light.

Different size disks let me create different things; I've got some coasters, and with the smallest of the disks the beginning of a pendant.

Ultimately, at some point, I'd love to be able to have a precise enough touch to be able to burn a portrait. That'll be epic.

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(c) All images and photographs, unless otherwise specified, are created and owned by me.
(c) Victor Wiebe

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About Me

Amateur photographer. Wannabe author. Game designer. Nerd. 
General all around problem-solver and creative type.

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