Basic Woodburning Strokes and Textures

Pyrography texture patterns

Texture patterns do not need to solidly fill an area, they can have open spaces, repeating designs, and even re-create common shapes.

The practice board, right, is worked on a 9″ x 11″ piece of birch plywood.  A 1″ square grid layout had been made using a ruler and pencil.  Each small grid square can now be filled using a different texture pattern, temperature setting, or pen tip profile.

I create a practice board for almost all of my newest projects.  The board is made with the same media that I am using in my project so that I can compare my practice textures and tonal values directly to my project.

This lets me play, experiment, and make all of my mistakes on the practice board.

In the board on the right you may recognize a few of these texture stroke patterns.

The top row could easily become a brick or pavement layout for an old village street scene.

Row three shows pebble path and stone wall layouts that could be used in the foundation wall of a barn.  The fine line decoration of feathers could be worked from any of the textures in row four and the classic wood grain texture is found in the middle of row five.

Using textures to create your pyrography designs

The Quilt Barn pattern, shown right, was worked using just the texture patterns show on the practice board above.

This pyrography wood burning contains no graduated shading areas and no fine line detailing. In fact, in no area of the work did I try to replicate a realistic barn or landscape.  Instead I worked this pattern at the same time and on the same practice board as shown above, using one of the texture patterns for each area of the landscape scene.

Please click on the Quilt Barn image for a full sized, printable copy.

Practice board chart guide

Please click on the image for a full-sized printable image.

 Quilt Barn Practice Pyrography Pattern

Please click on the image for a full-sized printable free pyrography pattern.

Thank you for joining me in this close-up look at the texture, stroke,  and fill patterns used in our pyrography and wood burning projects – Lora S. Irish