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.
Here’s the sketch of the original pattern I’m using:
I settled on the shade of white I like–3 coats of the “white wash” I made, but you can still clearly see the wood grain since the white is not opaque. It’s a bit difficult to see the difference in this photo, but I chose the color of the block on the right, which was the lightest version of the 3 test blocks:
I tested out wood burning to create the lines of the pattern. I like the result, but when I first started I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. It took a long time for the wood burner to heat up all the way. I tried to make my first mark with the wood burner after it was plugged in for just a minute or so. It barely made a dent. I gave it another 10 minutes before I tried it again. The results were better, but not great. It seemed that the sharp metal tip was gouging into the soft wood without much actual burning. I fiddled with it for a while, going over the same lines several times and drawing with it very slowly, hoping that I just needed to get the hang of it. After maybe another 10 minutes, the metal tip was finally fully heated and was making nice smooth dark lines. I still had to practice and get the feel of it, but a wood burner definitely works best when it’s fully hot.
Here’s a photo of me waiting for the wood burner to heat up:
I tried out some oil pastels between the wood burned lines. While I like the effect, I’m not sure I love color for this project. Instead, I’m going to keep the color palette neutral. I have a few ideas to try tomorrow involving browns grays and black. Here are the test blocks I did:
**notice the wood burned lines!
Since I settled on the background color and wood burning, the next step was to paint all the blocks and then transfer the pattern.
This image gives you an idea about how I got the pattern on the wood blocks using graphite transfer paper:
Here’s a photo of the whole pattern transferred onto the blocks:
Tomorrow I’ll be burning in all the lines, and hopefully settling on an idea for how to color the positive space.
