anika mari

I’ve been working on my Wood Blocks project little by little and have made some notable progress from my last post.  I started again by burning in the lines that I’d copied onto the blocks with graphic transfer paper.

It took a while, but I eventually finished all the blocks.

With all the lines burned in, I didn’t have anymore time to stall about deciding how I would color in the positive space. I wanted the finished piece to have contrast of dark and light, and I also wanted it to be a neutral color palette, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results of the oil pastels and believe that trying to paint them would get to messy and drive me crazy. I tested out how the wood burner would color in wider areas of color if I used the side of the tool instead of the tip.

I liked the result, but I wasn’t sure how the wood burner would perform on the painted surface of the blocks, so I tried that out next on one of the old test blocks.

It worked pretty well, and I found it interesting that the paint wasn’t burned away but somehow stayed translucent over the burned surface. You can clearly see the effect by viewing the large version of this photo.

I had a little steam left after settling on burning in the positive areas, so I tried it on one of the proper blocks.

I messed up a little bit once, so there’s a spot outside the lines that’s burned, but I’ll try to fix it with some sand paper. That’s as far as I’ve gotten, and honestly I finished to that point a few weeks ago. I’ve been busy, and then I went to the beach. I’ll continue burning the rest of the blocks soon.