Woodburning can be worked on a wide variety of background surfaces. Although wood is the most common surface you can wood burn on vegetable tanned leather, dried gourds, watercolor paper, canvas duck cloth and paper mache.
Please note that these instructions assume that you have some knowledge of the techniques used in wood burning. If you are new to the craft please check out the link above for basic step-by-step instructions to this art form.
For this project I used a pre-formed paper mache shape wine caddy box. The design is a wrap around sunflower pattern with a butterfly placed across one of the side edges of the box. When the wood burning steps were complete I used artist quality colored pencils to add the bright vivid yellows, red browns and oranges to the flower’s petals with green and blue tones for my butterfly. The background area, unburned area of the box was toned with dark blue, purple and grey tones to set the flower colors forward. The outside of the paper mache box was sealed with several light coats of polyurethane spray.
To finish this project I made a simple cloth bag to place inside my box so that my sunflower caddy can be used as a dried flower holder, yarn needle box or for tall kitchen matches near the fireplace.
As you read through this project remember that you can “Click” on any of the images to open a large image for that step.
