Pyrography

What is it you may ask?

Just as it sounds - pyro- comes from Greek, where it has the meaning "fire, heat, high temperature and the English suffix -graphy means a "field of study" or related to "writing" a book, and is an anglicization of the French -graphie inherited from the Latin -graphia, which is a transliterated direct borrowing from Greek.

Enough with the English, let's get right into it! You may be thinking, "He's done something with fire, this could be interesting. Fire Art!" And if you thought that, you are correct - some call it pyrography, some call it wood burning, but many others call it Fire Art! I will create a new tab on the web page for all of my fire art.

I've done many wood burnings in the past, but have never posted one for all to see. (actually I may have posted the Vikings wood burning last year) After I type a few more sentences you will see how the project came together.

The Story

It was August; August 9th to be exact, the county fairs were on the rise. I could smell it - corndogs, mini donuts, barns that smelled of manure, but most importantly the Steele County Fair was amidst the excitement! And I had four days to get some projects done. Sign me up I said and that was how it began.

As I pondered on how I was to finish two paintings, one drawing, a wooden craft, and two wood burnings in four days I came to the conclusion that yes...yes, they were, I already had two paintings, one drawing, and a wooden craft done. All I had left were the two wood burnings. And of course, I set out to tackle the wood burnings, or the Fire Art.

I set out to wood burn the great Byron Buxton of the Minnesota Twins - my brother Dominic would also be doing Fire Art of him. But as I kept looking for the perfect photo to transform into Fire Art another idea hit me.

I took the tape measure and measured a piece of pine board that had all ready been cut - it measured 13.50 inches by 21.50 inches. I smacked my head with the palm of my hand (no not really) and then remembered that I still had a license for Revu Bluebeam - What? All of you say who? Revu who? It's just a PDF writer/reader that architects and engineers use. But with that I created a sheet the size of the wood and pulled in the picture I was to use and was able to print the whole document with multiple sheets of 8.50 by 11 paper.

And now for the progress pictures:

Day One:

Tracing the pattern on to wood. As you can see in the next pictures, the tracing was done in six different segments, I just don't have pictures of each segment so you'll have to use your imagination. The top, middle, and bottom each had two sides.

Day Two:

More tracing.

Day Three:

The Fire Art begins.

Day Four:

The finishing touches.

Thank you for viewing my Fire Art!

And now off to the fair! What would you like to see next?