pyrography

Tonal Values Add Depth to Your Project

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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Coloring Your Carvings and Wood Burnings

Painting Wood, Water Colors, Colored Pencils, Marking Pens

 

Coloring Your Project

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Color Chart for LSIrish.com
Basics to Painting
Adding Skin Colors with Watercolors
Basics to Painting
Acrylics over a Primer for Wood Carving
China Painting with Acrylics for Wood Carving
Dry Brushed Acrylics over Oil Stain for Wood Carvings
Marbling and Splatter Painting
Simple Dry Brushing for Wood Carving and Pyrography
Vintage Painting
Wood Carving and Burning Painting Supplies
Paint Kit Supplies for Painting Your Wood Carving
Steps to Success, Painting Your Wood Carving
Burnishing Your Wood Carving
Simple Blending with Acrylic Craft Paints
General Techniques Used in Wood Carving Paintingfinishing and paintinf techniques for wood
Basics to Painting for Pyrography and Wood Carving
Painting Eyes
Watercolors and Wood Burning
The Color Wheel, Who Is R. G. Biv?
Dry Brushing, Wood Painting Techniques by Lora Irish
Colored Pencil Let’s Talk Color
Marking Pen Quilts
Adult Coloring – Colored Pencil Application
Adult Coloring – Working with Colored Pencils
Adult Coloring Portraits
Colored Pencil Let’s Talk Color
Colored Pencil Pyrography
Color, Shadow, and Light in Pyrography
Coloring your Pyrography using Colored Pencils
Painting a Color Wheel for Pyrography, Gourd Art, Wood Carving
Working in Layers, Colored Pencils
Color Chart for LSIrish.com
Painted Blue Jeans 2, Free Craft Patterns
Painted Blue Jeans, Free Patterns
Sepia Toned Crayons

Coloring Your Carvings and Wood Burnings Read More »

What’s happening on our Pattern Site

What’s happening on our Pattern Site Read More »

Pyrography Styles – Simple Outlining

Simply outlining the pattern is often our very first project in pyrography wood burning.  After decades as a pyrographer I still use this art style on many projects because of the clear, crisp impact you get by just following the tracing lines.  Also called line art, outlining is often used in engraving, etching, woodcut and lithography.  For more please read this great Wikipedia article.

Learn more about art styles that can be used in your pyrography wood burning – Pyrography Style Handbook is available at Amazon.com.

 

Very simple, very flat, and very two dimensional, a simple outline conveys your image without details or shading.

This dragon face is worked on a 3″ leather key fob.  Since he is both well detailed and worked in a very small space,  simple outlining is the perfect choice.

Please learn more about burning on leather, here at LSIrish.com.

 

 

 

The leather burned purse and the birch plywood burn, above, both use the same pattern from our pattern pack – Dragon Medallions.  It is the lack of shading and extra detailing in the leather purse image that makes the dragon a stronger design then the wood version.  The wood version almost has too much to see compared to the clean, crisp image on the leather.

 

Wood burning, especially on paper mache, leaves a physical impression in the media.  Santa’s outline literally drops down into the surface of this paper mache box.  The trough that comes from a simple outline stroke can also be used as a damn.  Here it works to stop the application of the acrylic craft paints from spreading into the background area.

Note on this little Santa, the background is not burned totally black.  Instead it is filled with the words, “ho ho ho!”

For more holiday and Christmas ideas to use with your simple outline style of wood burning, visit our holiday pattern category in our pattern site, ArtDesignsStudio.com.

I have one more fun simple outline styled work to share with you.  Its a Celtic deer design.  While the above samples all use carefully controlled, uniform thickness lines, this hart uses thick and thin lines.  As you move through the pattern make some areas of the line width thick then taper back to very thin.  This adds a little dimension without losing the crisp, line art effect.

 

 

LSIrish.com is an affiliate of Amazon.com – Pyrography Style Handbook

Here’s a fun patterns for the twisted tail Celtic Hart. Click on the image below to save to your desktop.

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