Tips comes in many shapes and bends from the tight bend used in the standard writing tips to half circles that can create fish scales and even square tubes that make a textured pattern on your board.
BASIC PEN
I use four basic tools throughout this book – the loop-tip, ball-tip, spear shader, and spoon shader. These are the four snap-in interchangeable tips that comes with the Walnut Hollow Creative Tool – shown below.
Each pen tip creates its own width and shape of line burn, and therefore is more suitable for specific textures. Thin edged spear or curved shader tip cut thin, deep lines. Loop and ball tip pens burn thick, shallow lines. A basic beginner’s set of tips may include a tightly bent loop writing tip , a ball point writing tip, a flat spoon-shaped shader, a curved-edge spear shader. These tips will burn any pattern or project in this e-book. Specialty tips can be added as you discover your style of burning.
INTERCHANGEABLE V. FIXED TIP PENS
Tip shapes and names vary, depending on the manufacturer of your burning unit and are often offered in several sizes. Please check the website for your unit for more specific tips that are available for your use. Variable temperature pens come in two varieties – fixed tip pens and interchangeable tip pens. A fixed tip pen has the burning wire permanently set in the pen. Some manufacturers create a interchangeable pen that allows different styles of tip to be inserted into the end of the pen.
All of my Optima 1 pens are fixed tip pens.
Interchangeable pens often allow you to purchase a wider variety of burning tips, a great advantage to the new pyrographer.
Each manufacturer creates their pens to specifically fit the electric voltage, wire, and connections used in their wood burning units. Although some manufacturers do sell conversion kits that allow you to use pens manufacturer by other companies on their units I do not recommend this practice.
Using another companies pens can void your warranty and can damage both your pens and your burning unit. When you purchase your variable temperature unit consider not only the power features of the unit but also the pen construction, how the pens connect to the unit, the guard grip construction, and the variety of tip profiles available for your unit.
The photo, above, shows five of my Colwood Detailer tips. The top three are permanent fixed tip pens while the bottom two are interchangeable tips.
We will take a closer look at the burn strokes each pen tip creates in just a few pages.
A wood burning is created with five elements – the wood burning unit, the pen tips, the media on which you are working, the pattern or design you will burn, and the art style you will use to create the design. Lets look at the pyrography systems first. There are three styles of wood burning units: one-temperature tools, rheostat-controlled tools, and variable-temperature tools. Which you chose depends on both your interest in this craft, your pyrography budget, and the media on which you will be working.
The one temperature tool has the heating elements inside of the handle of the tool and comes with a variety of brass interchangeable tips that are placed in a threaded receptacle at the end of the tool. Tool tips for this style of burning system include the universal tip, calligraphy tip, cone tip, large ball shader and large flat shading tip.
Once plugged into an electrical outlet the tool quickly reaches an even but high temperature so the tonal value work in your project must be controlled through the textures or strokes that you use and the speed of the stroke. Very pale tonal values are burned by using a light pressure to the tip against the wood and moving the tool tip quickly through the burn stroke. Darker tones use a medium pressure and slower motion.
One temperature burning tools are inexpensive, readily available at your local craft or hobby store and excellent for first time wood burners to give our craft a try. I began wood burning twenty-five years ago with this style of tool. Several years ago I purchased a new one temperature unit so I would have two tools on the table, each with a different tip, ready for use in my projects. Today, although I now have two variable temperature systems I still find that I use my one temperature system on a regular bases.
A low-temperature, one-temperature tool is perfect for your leather, and cloth burnings.
A full range of tonal values can be burned using a one temperature tool. Burn your pale tones as the tool tip begins to heat and save your darkest tones for when the tool tip has reached its full setting.
This inexpensive beginner’s wood burning pen has a rheostat on the power cord which allows you to control the temperature of the burning tip. It allows you full control over the pen tip’s heat setting. The sample rheostat burner, shown below, uses the same interchangeable brass tips as the one temperature tool.
The screw-in brass burning tips shown here fit both the one-temperature burning unit and the rheostat unit. From left to right are shown a calligraphy tip, cone tip, flat shader tip, large ball tip, and a texturing tip. The universal writing tip is inserted in the burning pen. Brass tips can take quite a bit of pressure and abuse at very hot temperature settings which make them perfect for wide, thick black line work on heavily sapped woods as white pine, sugar pine and cedar.
The tonal values in the practice board are worked by controlling the pressure of the tip on the wood, the speed of the stroke, and the density of the lines burned as well as by adjusting the rheostat temperature settings.
For the projects and practice board shown in this book I am using the Walnut Hollow Creative tool – a variable-temperature tool with four interchangeable pen tips.
Variable temperature systems have a dial thermostat that allows you to control how cool or hot your tip is. You can adjust the temperature setting quickly making it easy to control your tonal values in your project. This style has two types of pens – the fixed tip pen where the tip is permanently set in the hand grip and the interchangeable pen where different wire tips can be used with the hand grip.
Because the temperature controls for variable-temperature tools are located in an independent case from the burning pen, the pen handle shapes are much thinner, light-weight, and easier to grip for long term burnings. A long cord from the control unit to the pen gives you free movement of your pen as you work your burning strokes.
HIGHEST QUALITY WOOD BURNING TOOLS
The high end, high quality wood burning units available to our craft have fixed-tip pens that transfer the heat of the unit through the pen tip uniformly. There is little or no variation in temperature burn settings between one project and the next. So when you need a medium-high tonal value of 5 you can rely on these units to give you the same tonal value time after time.
My tow favorites are shown below and both have been put through extremely hard use for over ten years. Both have preformed outstandingly.
The second high-quality wood burning unit that I purchased was a Colwood Detailer. This one burning tool has been used to create over ten years of pyrography pleasure and in the writing of five pyrography books. I highly recommend any Colwood product.
Optima 1 Dual Pen System The third high-quality tool that I added to my kit is the Optima 1 with a duel pen system. This unit has given years of hard work and was used in my latest two publications of pyrography. You can’t go wrong with an Optima.
I will note here that my first high-quality wood burning tool was a RazorTip that I used in the creation of my first pyrography book, The Great Book of Wood Burning. Personally, I find that RazorTip’s pen tip wires are not as durable or long lasting as those of the Optima or Colwood units.
This free, online pyrography book will take you, step-by-step, through the basic techniques of pyrography, also called wood burning. Over the next few days it will be posted in the order of the Table of Contents below.
So, please bookmark LSIrish.com so that you can enjoy this free e-project and work along with me as we create a wood burning practice board, explore wood burning tools, pyrography tips, and do two complete Celtic Knot Pyrography burns.
Pyrography is the art of creating simple line designs, highly detailed renderings, and shaded drawings using a hot tipped pen on natural, wood or wood-like surfaces. As the hot tipped pen is pulled across the surface of the media the tip literally burns the media to create pale through dark tonal value lines. The pattern of lines and shading strokes that you use in your wood burning work determines the art style of the finished project. Any pattern can be worked in any art style or in a combination of styles.
SAFETY
Let’s take a moment and consider a few simple safety precautions. 1. Your project media should be an untreated, unpainted, and unfinished natural surface. Paints, polyurethane sealers, varnishes, and chemicals used in treating wood can release toxic fumes during the burning process. 2. Do an Internet search on the media that you will be burning to discover if it has any toxic properties, there are several excellent data bases available. 3. Work in a well ventilated area. A small fan, set on your table that points toward your work, will move the smoke and fume away from your face. Whenever possible work near an open window. 4. Avoid laying your project in your lap during the burning steps. This places your face directly above the fumes, which increases your chances of inhaling the smoke. 5. Unplug your burning unit from the wall socket whenever you are not working. An unattended hot pen tip can cause fires. 6. While working, set your pens either on the pen stand provided by the manufacturer or on a tile ceramic tile.
During this free, online pyrography project I will be using Walnut Hollow’s Creative Tool. Available on Amazon.com at under $100 USD. It is an excellent entry-level, variable temperature tool that comes with the four interchangeable tips – ball-tip, loop-tip, spear-shader, and spoon-shader.
COPYRIGHT Your First Pyrography Project, a free for personal use online publication, is an original work, first published in 2020 by Lora S. Irish and Art Designs Studio and fully copyrighted, All International Rights Reserved and may not be distributed in any manner. The patterns contained herein are copyrighted by the author. Readers may make copies of these patterns for personal use. The patterns themselves, however, are not to be duplicated for resale or distribution under any circumstances. Any such copying is a violation of copyright law.
To discover more line art patterns and detailed drawings to use with your next pyrography project visit us at Art Designs Studio, Lora S. Irish’s online original craft, carving, and pyrography pattern site. For free, online craft projects visit us at our blog, LSIrish.com.
Because making the artwork shown in this book using craft, woodworking, or other materials inherently includes the risk of injury and damage, this book can not guarantee that creating the projects in this book is safe for everyone. For this reason, this book is sold without warranties or guarantees, of any kind, expressed or implied, and the publisher and author disclaim any liability for any injuries, losses, or damages caused in any way by the content of this book or the reader’s use of the tools needed to complete the projects presented here. The publisher and the author urge all artist to thoroughly review each project and to understand the use of all tools before beginning any project.
An easy way to get started with leather pyrography art journals is to purchase several scrap bag assortments of leather. This gives you a variety of leather to begin exploring leather burning. No piece is so perfect that you can’t just throw away a ‘mistake’ or cut it down to become a smaller cover. The textures, distortions, and flaws add to the vintage look of your journal when everything is done.
But you will note when you follow the links above that both packs have irregular edges, some clamp marks and stretch marks, and even a few wrinkles … which makes them even better when you are designing your Leather Pyrography Art Journal. Those pulls, stretch marks and little oddities in the leather surface give your journal cover a wonderful distressed, vintage look.
In the Mayan Leather Journal photo, above, you can see those stretch marks along the right side top and bottom corner.
I chose the Mayan design specifically for this scrap of leather. As Mayan hieroglyphs were worked as stone carvings they did not have crisp, clean, sharp edges to the design. As time, nature, and weather have eroded those same writings the edges have become more distorted. So what could be more perfect than a stone carving design on a wrinkled piece of leather. Those wrinkles give the feeling of the rock face in which the Mayan’s created their architecture.
When you add that as you wood burn your leather you also lightly sculpture the leather surface, our Mayan Priest becomes a 3-d rendition of the pattern. You can see along the left side of the cover how the burn pushes the leather down, leaving the un-burned or lightly burned areas proud of the surface.
Several light coats of a gloss acrylic spray sealer accents the 3-d effect of the leather and design by creating bright highlights along the edges of the pattern work.
This journal sample uses both an edge piece of a vegetable-dyed shoulder and a scrap piece of dark mahogany tanned leather for the back cover – one piece from both of the scrap packages above. Since the mahogany tanned leather is of a higher weight (thicker) than the veggie leather cover, I used my smallest v-gouge wood carving tool to create a simple checker board design directly into the back cover. Those gouge marks let that leather roll more easily as I use the journal. A third piece of scrap leather became the binding edge of the journal where the screw posts join all the leather pieces and hold the inside paper pages.
This little “Let the Stress Begin” Bird Pattern for pyrography and wood carving is worked on a mini-clipboard that measures 6 1/2″ high by 4″ wide. The outer 1/2″ edge of the clipboard was covered with painter’s tape after the pattern was traced. This protects that area of wood from being burned and when it is removed you have a clean, straight-lined border.
This is a simple silhouette burn on a high setting for your wood burning tool for the bird’s outline and body fill. The background grass was worked using a ball-tip pen on a medium temperature setting.
The white and yellow were added after the pyrography was completed using acrylic craft paints. After they dry finish your wood burning using your favorite spray sealer.
Please click on the image above to open a new window with the full-sized – 7″ x 10″ – pattern.
Please click on the image above to open a new window with the full-sized – 7″ x 10″ – pattern.
