Pyrography Basics

Let’s take a close look at how your photographs can be used for your next pyrography project, and how the color, shadow, and light of  those photos affect the tonal values of your wood burning.  Today we will start by defining the important terms that are used in describing light, shadows, colors, arrangements, and designs that we use in wood burning.

Shadow and Light in Pyrography Photos – Day 1
Shadow and Light in Pyrography Photos – Day 2
Shadow and Light in Pyrography Photos – Day 3
Shadow and Light in Pyrography Photos – Day 4

INTRODUCTION
As pyrographers we often use photographs as the base for our wood burning projects. Home photos of family and friends, a landscape photo of an old hip roof barn, and pets playing with their favorite toy are all possibilities for a realistic, finely shaded pyro burn.

Today’s digital cameras makes using photographs even easier as your image can quickly be uploaded to your home computer for instant printing.

Although a photograph accurately captures the scene or still life our eye does not necessary see what that photo truly caught.

During this tutorial we will look at how the human eye sees, how the brain interrupts the information from the eye, how color and gray-scale effect visual impact, and how you can learn to use this knowledge to create strong, bold, realistic pyrography images.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The brightly colored silk daisies grab the attention in the photo and are complimented by the ruby-red base to the antique oil lamp. Shades of golden-yellow are found in the dried leaves, left, the golden orange background daisy, and in the oak basket. Mossy green flows through the central elements of the dried leaves, upper oil lamp base, and in the silk leaves in the basket. Overall this still life has a nice triangular layout with bold dark shadows along the floor of the elements.

It seems a perfect photo for the base of a pyro project until you gray-scale the image. Suddenly those bright orange and yellow flowers disappear into the background area. What appeared to be a bright highlighted area on the oak basket is now a dull mid-tone value. There are very few white highlights.

The flowers on the floor of the still life have little definition between one flower and another as all have taken one the same tonal value. This is also occurs in the basket flowers.  The gray-scale of the flowers nearly matches the gray-scale tones of the background behind the flowers.

Having gray scaled the photo we discover that it was the hue – the pure colors – of the photo that carried the visual impact.  Without the color hues the flower tonal values disappear into the background tonal values.

As we work through this tutorial we will take an in-depth look at why this bright, colorful still life is not suitable as a sepia toned pyrography painting.

A VERY SIMPLE DRAWING
As you look at the photo and colored pencil drawing to the left you may see a common tomato, unremarkable, and not something that you might choose as the base for your next pyro project. Yet, this simple tomato holds a fast amount of information on how your eye sees an object, how light effects the tonal value of that object, and how color and shadow interact to create an image.

In this tutorial you will explore the differences between color and tonal value; direct and reflected light, cast and reflected shadows; and how to put those aspects to use in your wood burning. This tutorial will focus on the colors, gray-scale tones, and sepia tones found in photographs and colors.

TERMINOLOGY

Cast shadow – a shadow created because an object blocks the area from the light source
Contour – the curvature of a shape
Gray scale – a tonal value scale worked from white to black
Highlight – an area of direct sunlight
Hue – pure color, as red or blue, without white, gray, or black tones
Primary color – red, blue, and yellow; colors that can not be created by mixing other colors
Profile – the outline of a shape
Reflected light – a highlight created from light that has bounced off another surface
Reflected shadow – a shadow that has bounced off one surface onto the main object
Secondary colors – colors created by mixing two equal parts of two primary colors
Sepia scale – a tonal value scale worked in shades of brown
Tertiary colors – colors created by mixing two parts of one primary with one part of another
Tonal value – the amount of white, black, or gray contained in a color tone
Tones – a color with white, black, or gray added

EXPLORING THE BASICS OF YOUR PHOTOGRAPH

Any pyrography pattern, design, or photo will hold eight basic ingredients – form, arrangement, depth, texture, color, light, shadows, and focal points.

Form – the basic shape of each element within the design.  For this photo we have the shape of the flowers, the shape of the flower centers, the shape of the lamp, the shape of the basket, and the shape of the dark shadows on the floor of the layout.

Arrangement – this describes the boundary lines that hold the main elements of the design.  For our photo the elements can be captured in a triangle, making this a triangular arrangement.  The elements in this photo can be contained in a large triangle that starts on the left at the tip of the most extended leaf, to the top edge of the glass globe, and then to the blackest shadow point behind the basket.

Texture – the physical characteristics of the surface of each element – the weave of the basket reeds, the ribbing in the flower petals, and the smoothness of the glass globe.

Depth – includes the air space behind the elements, the elements that are deepest in the layout – background elements shown in the deep gray boundary lines, the elements that fall in the middle of the designs – the mid-range elements shown in the light gray boundary lines, and the elements that are in the front area of the design – the foreground shown in the white boundary lines.

Color – the hues of each element – red, blue, or yellow primary colors.  Colors can create their own boundary or arrangement lines within your photo as shown in the rectangular arrangement of the red tones of this photo.

Light – those areas that are directly hit by your light source – the bright and mid-tone whites of your wood burning.  Highlights can fall at any depth in your designs.  In the photo the brightest highlight falls on the glass globe which is in the background depth area of the photo.

Shadows – this describes the darkest tonal values of the wood burning that are created because those areas are blocked from direct light.

Focal Points – a focal point is the area of the design that first catches your attention.  There can be multiple focal points in any design, with one dominate point and other minor points.    The focal point of our practice photo is the bright white highlight that falls on the chimney of the lamp. It becomes the focal point because it is the brightest, purest color in the photo, because it falls in the center of the arrangement boundary triangle, and because it falls on top line of the color boundary.

Tomorrow we will work through the color wheel, color groups, highlights, reflected highlights, cast shadows, reflected shadows, and contour tonal values … see you then!

Lora is the author of the Great Book of Wood Burning,
available at Amazon.com. For more great craft books by
Lora Irish, please visit our Book Gallery.

Tonal values, the shades of sepia from pale coffee with cream to dark chocolate, create the shading colors in our pyrography work.  By planning in advance areas of your work that place one very pale tone against an extremely dark tone you can give an area dramatic contrast, impact, and added depth.

Let’s use the wood burning, Grandpa’s Old Car, as our example of how contrast adds  depth to your pyrography designs. Please click of the finished burning and pattern for full sized printable images.

In the finished wood burning you see an old, abandoned car near a foreground tree and old fence line.  This is our foreground area of the pattern.  Directly behind the car stands a small clumb of trees and a gently rising hillside, this becomes our mid-ground area of the work. In the backgroud, along the hill ridge is a barn and tree line which falls in the background area of the pattern.

For a moment take a look out your window.  Notice that those items or elements that are nearest to you are also the items that have the strongest color and shadow contrasts to them.  The closer an element is to the viewer the stronger the color hues will appear. Foreground elements have distinct white highlights and crisp dark shadows.

Move you eye to the mid-ground area of you window view.  The elements or items in this visual range still have coloration, but the colors are not longer as bright and bold.  Shadows in the mid-ground area lose their white and black tones and move into the middle range of gray or brown.

Move your eye farther into the window view, try and find some distant point.  Notice that the background areas have lost much of their coloration.  Most coloring in the background falls in the gray-brown muted tones.  There are few distinct shadows in the distant background of any view.

Air – atmosphere – is not crystal clear.  Air contains fine water particles that when viewed close up, in the foreground of our designs, are invisible.  But the farther we look into a designs as a landscape the more the water particles whiten or cloud the view.

So the farther back we look the more ‘white’ from the water particles cover the elements of the scene. You can see that used in Grandpa’s Old Car pyrography.  The barn scene that is in the background is worked in a narrow range of pale tonal values to give the effect of looking through water laden air.  The mid-ground trees, just behind the car, have more contrast in the tonal values, but those values all fall in the mid-range of our tonal value scale.  Only the foreground had dramatic tones of white and black.

The tonal value placement matches the actual tonal value ranges of each area of a landscape.

Drama can also be created by placing one white tone directly in contact with one full black tone.  Notice along the bottom edge of the car.  The wheel wells and fender area have solid black tones.  In contract the grass in front of the car, that touches the car are unburned, white areas in the design.  That black and white contrast area directly sets the car on the ground in the grass.    This black and white contrast area is so bold that it pulls your eye, over and over again, to that area of the pyrography.