Selecting a Medium for Pyrography

Video Transcript

"Now you’re ready to burn, one of the things you want to look at is wood selection. The nice thing about a wood burning tool is I found out you can burn one in many, many different ways. Ideally I found out that some of the better woods to burn on would be a bass wood or a tupelo it’s got a nice smooth grain and it’s almost like drawing on a sheet of paper. You can also burn on walnut, cherry or just on any type of wood. One of the harder woods that I found to burn on is a pine, as you go across a pine, you will get a lot of black marks as you go across the grain. Other things you can burn on and this is called artist’s conch, it’s a fungus that grows on trees and it’s very adaptable to wood burning. There are other things you can wood burn on too, gourds and papers, one of the papers I like to wood burn is usually 100 percent rag type paper, cotton or you can in fact burn it on anything, it all depends on how you want to set you heat. So a lot of times with the wood you want to use, it depends on what you feel comfortable with, I’ve seen some people and all they want to burn with is the walnut, I’ve seen some that will just burn on anything. So that’s basically your personal preference or what you have availability to. Now another thing, if you noticed, is that I have my windows blocked off here, a lot of times what you don’t realize is as you have your wood laying around the sunlight, the UV rays can come in and really mess your wood up. So, you need to take good care of your wood and where you place it so the UV rays will not affect your wood. "