Pyrography: A tutorial.

Hey guys.. today I’m going to be creating another pyrography (wood burning) piece. This entry will be a bit long since I will be explaining different things to help you out.
You will need:

• Pictures of what you want to burn. Scaled and printed in different sizes, to meet the different sizes of wood you may have.
• Wood I bought mine from CraftParts.com It’s a wholesale place and, pretty cheap. I’m already in love with them..
• Wood burner or soldering kit. whichever. I bought mine from widget supply along with some extra tips. Here are the Burner and, extra tips that I bought. Also fairly cheap.
• Carbon copy paper. I bought a package of 100 from Staples. It was $16.99 but check online first to see if a store near you has it. I’m sure you could also check out officemax or any other office supply store near you.
• Sharp pencils or fine point pen.
• Scissors
• Tape
• *optional* Paints, acrylic. In whatever colors you want.
• Water. for wiping down your final piece and, if you’re going to use paint.
• *optional* paint brushes.
• *optional* varnish, in either gloss, matte or, satin finish.

So let’s get started.
Here I have my scissors, tape, different sizes and types of wood, fine point pen and, wood burner. The wood burner IS NOT on right now. it’s just plugged in and, is sitting in the holder.

Here are all the tips. (minus one that I found rather irrelevant) I’m only going to be using two tips today. A fine point and a slanted point. Closer view later.

Here are some of my photos. through Google search engines I found different clip art or pictures I wanted to use and print them out. I wrote on this one “original” because this is the original print size. This fits on the square piece of wood that I have. but for the heart star and, block which are much smaller. I had to scale it down. You can do this in two ways.

#1: Save the image to your computer. Open an photo editing program. Change the pixel size. Don’t stretch or shrink the picture by the arrows. You’ll distort the picture. For a clear picture, just change the pixel size and print. You can change and save the image in different sizes by clicking “save as” and renaming the picture so that you don’t lose the original. From here you can print whichever size you need to work on for your project.

#2: Use a copy machine.. luckily for me, We have a few large scale copiers at my  job.. and I use them to my advantage on my lunch break. With this method, place the original image on the screen and click “reduce/enlarge” pick which percent you want it to be reduced to. For me since I have different sizes. I reduced it to 25% of it’s original size. Now 25% is the lowest our copiers are set to. So take the new size and reduce it again. I did this till I had about 5 different sizes of all the pictures I had.

Carbon paper. This is how you will get your image onto your wood, unless you free hand. in some cases I will freehand.

This side will go face down onto your wood.

This is the other side. you’ll tape your image to this. Then the wood.


Yea… This is different from the finished product on top.. but I started with this, then realized I really wanted to do that Celtic knot. Anyway I cut out the picture, Placed it on the carbon paper and cut a square, then cut around the picture. I want it to stick out a little more then the actual picture. place a piece of tape on both the picture and, carbon paper with enough sticking over to tape it to the wood

Tape your image to the wood. making sure it’s in the exact spot you want it. This is why I also cut as close as possible to the picture and, cut the carbon paper close around it. You only need to tape it in 3 or 4 places, enough so the picture will not move. Now take your pen. You want a really sharp pencil or, a fine point pen so that the lines in in your wood will be as, clean as they are in the picture. You can color in any shaded areas, so that you know that they will be shaded when burning. even though you will still use the picture as a guide. When finished, remove the tape from one area at a time and check to see if you’ve covered every line, if not tape it back down and continue drawing. You want to do this slowly and, not remove the entire picture because one you move it.. well.. good luck putting it back exactly where you had it.


Here’s the copy on the wood.

Screw in your first tip and, turn on the burner. give it 5 mins to heat up. You’ll be able to tell the difference in color of the metal that, it’s hot enough. If it’s a new shiny silver tip it kind of turns blue-purple.  In the meantime clear up your space. making sure your wire is not going to knock anything over.. Make sure your kids are occupied so that they don’t bump you because hot metal + skin= a trip to the ER..and we don’t want that. (especially on your first try)
Once your burner is ready, start from one side and begin to trace all your fine point lines. do not linger. just draw like you were using a pen or markers. You can go over the line again and, again if necessary. Lingering will leave not only darker lines but, will cause burn marks in your piece probably where you don’t want them.

This is the Celtic knot I said I wanted to do. I went over the lines 2 times. as I worked in the area. You can turn your piece in whichever way it’s comfortable for you to do the burning. Going with the grain of the wood is always going to be easier.


After I finished all the lines, I wanted the knots to stand out more. So using the same tip I went in and burned all the blank spaces inside the knot.

Turn off your burner and let it cool for about 15 minutes.  Once it’s cooled, change your tip to this slanted one. I believe I have 3 sizes. Use the smallest to keep your accuracy up. Turn the burner back on.

Using the tip above drag it along the edges of the wood. Press it into the edges of the wood.. be careful and don’t cover any of the lines.. Doing both the dragging and pressing gives the wood this shiny effect. This tip is used for shading.  with a light touch it would have been as light as the burned parts inside the knot. but I wanted it to be darker. Now this is a finished piece.. I could wipe it down, put on a varnish and call it a day.. but I’m never that simple and I love color.. So take a damp piece of paper towel and wipe down your piece. This will remove any debris.

Here is my collection of acrylic paints.. from Michaels. Mostly metallics because I LOVE metallic colors.


I enjoy the two oz. bottles. I usually keep 2 or 3 bottles of metallic white and black because I use them more often when making new colors. For the knot I will be using various mixtures of the following Bayberry, Metallic Aquamarine, Forest Moss, Metallic Peridot, Metallic Emerald, Metallic White and, Metallic Black (not pictured here). You can also see the varnish in this picture. I do have a big bottle of this somewhere around this house but thankfully I keep this one with the 2 oz. collection.

Now after making your colors, dip your brush (a tiny brush) into your water, then paint. You want to paint the wood with thinned paint. This picture shows the first version.. I had did two circles before realized that there are 4 separate links not 2 like I thought and, that I can do 4 separate colors.. so I revisited my colors and started over. A plus to the thinned down paint is that it seeps into the wood and dries fairly quickly.

See, I did 2 colors and was totally unsatisfied..

I picked 3 new green mixtures and painted over 3 of the knots. Then I was satisfied  

Add the varnish and let it dry. Here you have your finished piece.. enjoy.


In an unrelated project, my mother wanted me to repaint this bird house that I painted when I was younger. It hangs from the 2nd door in the front of the house. it’s how she can tell the door is closed. But when I was younger I never put varnish on it so over time whenever we had the screen door in, the rain would slowly take the paint off and now it looks like this..

Here I freehanded the bird and I free handed some burns to look like grass.

Using these colors Metallic antique Copper, Berry Wine, Metallic Sahara Gold (I have about 8 different gold's.. it’s ridiculous), Vintage White and, Metallic Champagne. I made the following.

This was used to paint the house.

Metallic Sahara Gold, Vintage White and, Metallic Champagne were used to make a color for the bird. Which I then used some Sahara gold to paint “feathers”



Berry Wine, Metallic Antique Copper and, Metallic Black formed a color used for the text on the house. I had originally burned the words in, but didn’t like the way it looked so I painted over it, then painted it in instead.


Metallic Blue Topaz was used for the shingles.

Finished piece.

Here I just wanted to show the grass. I burned the lines in. Then taking a mix of Metallic Emerald and, Metallic Black, I painted over the lines in a criss cross pattern. After letting it dry a bit, I then took Metallic Emerald by it self and, painted a few lines. Then took Metallic Peridot and painted some more lines.. This is the result of that.




I’ll be back in a little bit for some Easter crafts