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Complete Pattern Collection on Sale!

General Crafts, Pyrography, Uncategorized / By

Treat yourself this holiday season to thousands of patterns, ideas, and templates.  All original art by Lora S. Irish.

Our best sale of the year, through Dec. 31st.

Today’s Tips and Tricks is below!!!!
Bullet paper covered wood ornaments for Pyrography

 

 

 

Our artist and author, Lora S Irish, has written 49 books during her crafting, wood carving, and wood burning career, dedicated to teaching you the basics to our favorite hobbies.  They make great stocking stuffers!  Available at Amazon.com.

 

Dec. 09, 2024 Tips and Tricks

 

Simple, quick, and just plain fun … These Christmas tree ornaments are worked on pre-cut wooden ornament shape that measure 70-80 mm/2 7/8 to 3 1/4″ round.

Supplies:

3″ wooden ornament pre-cut, finished shapes
Cream colored, gird, bullet journal paper – A5 or A6 size
DIY Paste Glue
1/2 cup warm water
1/2 cup whole milk
2 Tble. white vinegar
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. baking soda
Coffee filters
Small, lidded container
Retractable craft knife
Wood burning unit with a ball- , loop-, or writing tip pen
#2 pencil or All graphite drawing pencil
White artist eraser or Eraser dry cleaning  bag
Matt acrylic spray sealer or Fixit spray reworkable sealer
Assorted coloring media
Colored pencils
Gel pens
Watercolor paints

So I know you are wondering why go through this long … long … long … glue paper to wood process when you are a pyrographer and the pre-cut ornament is made of wood?

 

If we were working on basswood, birch, or poplar pre-cut wood ornaments I would not recommend gluing heavy-weight bullet journal paper to your ornament. These three wood species have tight grain that can be sanded smooth.  They are the primary three woods used for advanced pyrography work.  But most pre-cut wood shapes  are made out of a porous, wide grained wood, Paulownia,  that has been laminated to create a thin plywood which does not allow you to completely erase your pencil lines, burn with any consistency, or accept coloring in an even coating.

The left ornament is a bullet paper glued ornament.  The burned lines are fairly even in coloring, thickness, and depth.  The paper is a paler color tone that the raw wood ornaments which gives you bright white coloring and a wide tonal value range.  The center ornament was worked on the raw wood.  It shows how the open, porous grain of this wood causes skipped areas in your burned line, heavy dark dots and uneven coloring of the lines.  The right hand ornament also shows that the pencil outline has created a small dent in the wood, which hows even though the pencil lines have been erased.

Plus … the dot grid paper makes creating your own design or adding lettering to your ornament so easy!

Let’s get started:

Preparation:

1. Do not sand or buff your wooden ornaments. 

A slightly rough surface will give your DIY paste glue more area on which to adhere.  If you want even more ‘grab’ to your glue, lightly sand the ornament with 220-grit sandpaper.  Work any sanding strokes with the direction of the grain to create tiny channels that will fill with your paste.  Dust well.

2.  Make your DIY paste glue.

DIY paste glue has a very low moisture content, because you control how much water/whey liquid is left in the curd mix. Whey is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained. Curds is the soft, white substance, milk fat, formed when milk sours, used as the basis for cheese and what will become the paste glue.

For the strongest bond using any glue, you want some of the glue to soak into the top surface of the media you are gluing.  But when the glue has a high water content the paper soaks up that water and will expand and buckle.  Those buckles in the paper will remain after the glue dries.  By mixing your own paste glue, you can remove almost all of the water content, avoiding that expansion and buckling problem.

Mix together one-half cup of warm water and one-half cup of whole milk.  Mix.  Microwave for 30 seconds to bring the mix to room temperature.  Add 2 tablespoons of white vinegar.  This will curdle the milk, causing the milk to separate into the watery liquid called whey and small pieces of the milk fat, called curds.  Mix.  Put a coffee filter into a flour sifter or strainer.  Pour the glue milk into the filter, allow the liquid to drain well.  Scrape the remaining curd mix into a small refrigerator container that has a lid.  Add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to the mix.  Stir well.  The baking soda neutralizes any remaining vinegar acid.  A few very small clumps may remain but are easily brushed out when you apply the glue.  Store in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

3.  Apply one even coat of DIY paste glue to the surface of your wood ornament. I did not glue the ‘hanger cap’ area of my ornaments, as I planned to paint this area with gold marking pen.

4.  Lay the glue-covered ornament face down onto the grid, bullet paper, aligning the center of the wood ornament to the gird dots.  Turn face up and press well, working from the center out, to remove any air pockets.

Bullet journal paper comes in lined, blank, and gird prints.  Both the lined and grid versions are printed on both sides of the paper. The off-white, cream, and kraft brown colored papers tend to be a heavier weight of paper than standard writing or printer paper.  That extra paper weight means you have more paper fibers to absorb the small amount of moisture left in your DIY paste glue mix.  This helps greatly to avoid any expansion in the paper during the gluing process.

5.  Place your paper-glued ornament, face up on the table.  Lay one to two heavy books on top of the ornament to add a little, extra weight during the drying process.  Allow the ornaments to dry overnight.

Notice!!!! I did not cut the excess paper from the ornament before I allowed the glue to dry.  Again, the paper has soaked up the moisture from the DIY paste glue.  This softens the fibers.  If you try to cut before that moisture is gone and the paper fibers have re-stiffened, your paper is more likely to pull away from the ornament than be cut cleanly, leaving tiny areas of empty, paperless space on the finished ornament.

All glues – wood, acrylic, paste – need pressure to make the best contact between two surfaces.  For this project I stacked several ornament and then used a 2 1/2″ thick dictionary that I keep in the studio just for this purpose.

6.  Use a retractable craft knife. Remove the current cutting edge so your are working with a fresh point.  Lay the ornament upside down on a cutting mat.  Lay the knife edge against the wood ornament and use the ornament’s edge as your cutting guide to free the excess paper.  Save the grid paper scraps!  You will use them when you begin burning the pattern outlines.  Use can use a finger nail file to smooth the paper edges.

Save your bullet paper scraps for the wood burning steps.

A retractable craft knife has several advantages for projects like this.  You can adjust how long the cutting blade is.  The shorter the blade the more accurate you cut will be when you have an guide edge or lip as the wood ornaments give you.  You can remove the current point, using flat-nosed pliers, so that you have a new, sharp cutting point.  This is especially important whenever you are cutting paper.

Because you have allowed the glued paper to dry overnight, you will get a clean cut with no pulling on wet fibers.

Creating the design!

 

7. Using a pencil, lightly mark your pattern, using the gird dots as your guide.

There are some wonderful line art ideas that you can find on both Google, and Pinterest.  Search under Mandala patterns, line separators, and henna designs.  Please visit my pattern website, ArtDesignsStudio.com for original pattern line art for your next craft project.

8.  Set your wood burning unit to a medium to medium high temperature setting.  Test your temperature setting, and your pen tip selection by burning a few lines or test designs on the cut scraps of gird bullet paper.

I chose to wood burn my outlines because this sets the design permanently into the paper.  I can erase, work coloring, and seal the design without loosing that burned pattern.  Wood burning on paper also creates a tiny trough or lowered area where the line is burn.  This makes coloring easier a it becomes a gutter that naturally stops the spread of water color and acrylics.

9. Wood burn the design outline.

At this point in the project you can work you design as a stand-alone wood burning.  Add shadows, tonal values, and detailing by changing your pen tip or you can work just the outline and use other coloring media to add bright detailing.

10.  Using a white artist eraser, remove any pencil marks.  Dust the ornament well to remove any eraser dust.

Colored erasers – like the pink eraser on the end of your #2 pencil – are color dyed.  That color can leave a streak on your project that can not be removed.  Inexpensive pencil erasers are also more coarse in texture than a white artist eraser and can cause damage to the area you are working on both wood and paper surfaces.  An eraser pad, a cloth bag filled with eraser particles, makes a wonderful cleaning tool.  The flexibility of the cloth bag means you can clean any shape or texture easily.

11.  You are ready to decorate your ornament design using your favorite coloring media – colored pencils, gel pens, water colors, or craft acrylic paints.  Create layers of coloring by using either a light coat of matte spray sealer or reworkable spray sealer between lightly applied coats!

12. Sign and date your ornament on the back with either your wood burning tool or a pencil, so that your work is noted as being an original creation. Give your ornament several light coats of matte spray sealer, both front and back, to complete this project.

 

Hope you have fun.  ~Lora

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Five Styles of Relief Wood Carving

Leave a Comment / General Crafts, Relief Wood Carving, Woodcarving / By

Since I was rambling on yesterday about tonal values / shadows and light, I thought I would show you how those tonal values are captured in our wood carving.

There are five main styles of relief carving – incising, sunken, low, middle, and high.

This is a continuation of yesterday’s posting, Tonal Values Add Depth to Your Wood Carving, Pyrography, and Colored Pencil Projects.

 

Click on the image below for the full-sized jpg.  Keep a copy on your computer for reference when working your next wood carving project.

Incised carvings, also called intaglio, are extremely flat and have little or not actual shadows on the main elements as those elements are not carved. Instead the background areas are carved to a very shallow depth and then cut with fine, sharp lines. This is the common techniques used for engraving.

Sunken relief is where the main elements are carved down into the wood and the background is left at its original depth. This is most often found in Egyptian stone carving.

Low or bas relief, also called basso-relieva, is a shallow carving technique where the joint lines between the main elements and the background are straight cut and visible. Few shadows are created in the work so this may also be called silhouette carving.

Middle relief, Canada Goose Relief Wood Carving Project, is the first carving technique that uses some undercuts to create darker shadows along the edges of some elements. Usually less that one-half of the element edges will be undercut with the remain edges or joint lines worked as bas or low relief.

High Relief, sometimes called alto-relieva or deep relief, heavily uses the technique of undercutting to make the main elements of the design appear to be free floating above the background. The shadow created by high relief range from extremely black to soft tones.

Cheryl Coupland is showing a fantastic example of high relief in her carved and painted floral bouquets.
https://www.facebook.com/cheryl.coupland…

Please keep a copy of my Quick Guide on your computer for reference and for ideas on how to approach your next project.

 

Practice these styles of wood carving with our free, online projects.

Mule Deer Relief Wood Carving

Relief Carving the Canada Goose

Wood Carving Celtic Dragon

 

Thanks for reading. ~Lora

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Tonal Values Add Depth to Your Project

Leave a Comment / Colored Pencils, Painting and Color Work, Pyrography, Uncategorized, Woodcarving / By

Tonal Values in all crafts – wood carving, wood burning, colored pencils, and painting

If really is amazing the odd moments that you remember and that affect the rest of your life.

Mom and I had been to a doctor in lower, southern Baltimore that day.  She decided to take the long way home as it was a wonderful country ride and it avoided the “new” interstate highway.  I must have been less than 10 as my younger sister was not yet born, so about 1958 to 1962.

It was all rural dairy farm land at that time, Maryland’s main agriculture for the Piedmont area.  Late afternoon, driving into the setting sun, we came to a T intersection just above the little town of Olney.  Mom just stopped at the cross road and looked out across the farm land in front of us.  We just sat there for the longest time.

In front of us was a small hill of pasture land with an old wire fence.  On top of the rise was a dilapidated barn, leaning slightly, surrounded by young weed-tree saplings.  The silo was long gone, but the old, rusting tractor still sat by the side of the barn.

“See that fallen down barn … look at where the roof has caved in and where the windows and doors are long gone.  Do you see the light coming into the inside of barn from the holes in the roof?  Look at how black the inside of the barn is but how bright the sunlight patches are where they hit the floor. They are brilliant white”

“Do you see the locust trees growing inside the barn, how their trunks and branches are white in sunlight coming into the barn, then disappear into the black shadows, but come out of the roof looking white again?”

‘Notice how you can’t really see anything inside the barn where the black shadows are but you can see all the details where the sunlight has come through the roof.  Now THAT’S a painting!!!!”

It wasn’t the barn; it wasn’t the old tractor; it wasn’t even all the colors of the field, trees, and red barn paint that she saw … it was the light and shadows.  Mom was an accomplished artist who, as I, started out as an oil painter and later supported her family from her craft business income.

I passed that barn many, many times later in my life when I traveled from the University of Maryland to home.  Over the years it slowly settled into just a pile of rotten wood planks, and eventually was lost under those weed-trees that had grown to full size.   Every time I came to that T intersection, like Mom, I stopped and looked and pondered the bright sunshine highlights and the black afternoon shadows – the tonal values of that rustic landscape.

So in working on a new update for my blog and pattern site I was compiling a series of images of some of my work, shown above.   When I put them together as one image – wood carvings, wood burnings, colored pencils, tutorials, and oil painting – I realized they all had one thing in common.  Every project, for me, is about tonal value and how to capture those bright white highlights and blackest shadows.

Art is about the white eyelashes of that cow lying over the blackest shadow inside her ear.  Its about cutting a deep undercut to free the sides of the fence from the wood to cast a dark shadow.  Its about working the under painting of a white flower so that the insides of the petal are starkly contrasted to the white roll overs of the petal’s edge.

For me, art is about tonal values, and it is because of that one little, brief moment of my Mom sharing her love of just seeing the world through those highlights and shadows.

Thanks for letting me sharing this memory!

~Lora
Tonal Value Sepia Worksheet
Wood Burning Sepia Values
Mapping Your Pyrography Pattern
Contrasting Tonal Values
Light and Shadows in Pyrography
 

 

 

 

 

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common mistakes in chip carving

Six Common Mistakes in Chip Carving

Leave a Comment / Chip Carving, Chip Carving Projects, Woodcarving / By

Do you make these common mistakes in your chip carving?

Too often a chip carved triangle is just not perfect. So let’s look at why these small errors happen and how to correct them to create the very best chip carving project you can!

common mistakes in chip carving1. RAGGED WALLS

Ragged walls can be caused by either poor quality wood or an improperly sharpened knife.  Basswood is a common chip carving wood that has finely packed, dense grain lines, and is considered an easy wood to work.  But not all basswood is adaptable to chip carving.  Avoid end grain plaques as you are cutting across the open end of the vascular bundles, which are similar to small soda straws that draw moisture up through the tree.  Also avoid ‘hardware store’ thin basswood sheets.  The 1/4″ and 1/8″ thick sheets are not the high wood quality of a 3/4″ plaque.

A dull knife tears through the wood grain instead of cutting it.  Learn how to properly sharpen your chip carving knife.  When you are concerned that your chips are repeatedly coming out rough, stop and take time to resharpen and hone your knife edge.

 

cutting triangle chips in chip carving2. ROUGH CENTER POINT IN THE CHIP WELL

Each chip should have a sharp, clean point at the center of the chip well.  This is caused because the angle of one of the side cuts did not fully reach the deep center point of the chip, where the three walls intersect.  Correct this by re-cutting that wall, taking your knife point slightly deeper.

Free form lines and straight wall cuts also can get misaligned at the center of the well.  Double check that you are using the correct hand grip on your knife and that your depth is even throughout the cutting stroke.

 

3.  STAGGERED WALL STROKES

This chip’s wall was cut with several staggered strokes.  During the cutting step either you changed the angle of your knife, or paused during the cut which misaligned the knife’s edge through the remaining stroke.  Re-cut that wall with one, smooth, clean stroke.

 

 

 

4.  THIN TOP EDGE

Your knife angle is just as important at the top of the triangle cut as it is on the wall and well.  It is easy to end up with a top edge that is not razor sharp, the preferred finish for any chip carver.  A simple wobble as you make the stroke can cause the knife to miss the fine edge of the neighboring chip.

Try turning the wood to recut the chip.  A new view of that top edge may help steady the stroke.

 

stab knife chip cuts5. WOBBLY EDGES

Every  chip carver discovers wobbly edged chip walls.  I find this problem often occurs when I am cutting through a spray adhesive paper pattern.  Both the glue and the paper can cause the knife edge to be pushed away from the pattern line.  Correct this by re-cutting the chip wall by thinly shaving just the bulge, not the points of the chip.

 

 

chip carving cuts6.  CHIP OUT

Chip outs happen and can be caused by several reasons.  If you are working on a heavy grain wood as sugar pine, the change in the grain can cause a small thin point to break free.

On soft woods, as basswood, the edge of the point can be lost because the knife was pulled out instead of lifted out of the cut.  To lift out the knife simply stop the stroke.  Gently pull the knife back along the stroke just a small bit, then lift the knife free from the cut.  Pulling on the tip of the blade at the end of the cut can add excess pressure that lifts a grain line.

Over cutting one side of the point, reaching the blade too deeply into the wood, can cause a point to chip out.  Try scoring the pattern line first by lightly cutting along the line with just the tip of your chip knife.  This pre-cuts and therefore pre-releases the wood grain at the point of the chip before you make the actual chip stroke.

Chip outs can be repaired by using wood glue and a tooth pick.  Place a small drop of glue on he board at the break out spot.  Use the toothpick to insure that the glue is deeply pressed into the chip area, not trapping any air space below the glue.  Replace the chip out and press firmly.  After about one-half hour of drying you can re-cut and sand this area.

NOTE – SANDPAPER FEELING TO THE CUTTING STROKE

It bares noting again that the greatest success with your chip carving comings with a properly sharpened chip knife.  So, please download a copy of our free, 38 page, pdf file on Easy Steps to Bench Knife Sharpening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chip Carving Workshop, written by Lora S Irish is available on Amazon.com.

Learn how to carve beautiful designs in wood with just a few basic knives!

  • Over 200 designs, ready to use, with layout ideas, grids, borders, and motifs
  • Step-by-step practice project helps you master the simple chip carving shapes and techniques you will need
  • Expert advice on knife selection & sharpening, how to prepare your wood blank, and how to transfer patterns
  • Tips & techniques for hand positions, knife positions, gang cutting, and how to handle a chip out
  • Blank practice grids so you can use your new chip carving knowledge to create your own designs

Chip carving, also known as spoon carving or “Kerbschnitt,” is the ideal introduction to woodcarving for beginners.

This simple traditional carving method uses just a few basic knives to remove selected chips of wood in small triangles, squares, and free-form curves, producing amazingly intricate and delicate results.

Internationally known woodcarving artist and author Lora S. Irish shows you how to get started in this venerable craft! Inside Chip Carving Workshop, Lora takes you through all the essential chip carving techniques, from tool sharpening and preparation to hand positions, chip cutting, and finishing.

You’ll discover how to use both geometric shapes and free form designs to create wonderfully detailed patterns. A step-by-step practice project shows you how to master the simple shapes that will allow you to cut any grid pattern in the book.

Hundreds of ready-to-use designs offer a rich treasury of chip carving layout ideas, grids, borders, and motifs for you to trace and reproduce in any combination or size.

Decorate household items and create artistic pieces in a variety of original designs: Hope chests, wooden spoons, jewelry chests, clocks, candle plates, serving trivets, and decorative plaques are just a few ideas for your new chip carving skills!

 

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