Burnt Offerings

 So I have a new thing I'm doing and it has suddenly struck me as COMPLETELY INSANE and I am possibly having a bit of an anxiety attack about it right now.

I have been doing wood burning.

Here is a deer that I burnt onto a rubberwood cheeseboard.

These are little jars, I drew on the lids of, and filled with a mix of store bought potpourri and some I made myself.

And a larger jar

My set up is extremely basic. I have a wood burning pen, that looks more or less like a soldering iron, actually it is more or less a soldering iron, it even has a soldering tip so you can use it as one, but it also has a bunch of brass tips for burning wood. It's not very hard and it's fun.

There are more complicated set ups. There's a huge jump in price as well. My set is either twenty or forty dollars, depending on how many attachments you get and whether you get it from Hobby Tools Australia or Bunnings. But it has absolutely no temperature control. Better kits have a temperature control knob. I've seen a couple of other sets in a similar price range but then the price suddenly leaps to three or four hundred dollars which seems to be a lot. Especially considering what can be done with t the basic kit. How much better can a four hundred dollar kit be? 

Here's where it starts sounding crazy. On Sunday I'm going to a market to see if I can sell any of my stuff. Which is terrifying and nerve wracking. Yay. Can we make this sound crazier? Ok. I have been doing wood burning for less than a month at this point. And for a week and a half of that time, I had no wood burner. (I listened to obviously stupid advice and broke it and needed to get a replacement.)

Right now I feel like this is the stupidest idea I've ever had. I'm super under prepared. I usually prefer to be super over prepared. I want to cry and panic and hide but for some reason I feel like I need to do this.

So here are some more pretty pictures I made, I'm off to make price tags and stuff.

Protea with blue gum tips

Cocky

Princess BunBun and Princess Pork chop

A bunch of kitchen thingys.

Looking at those tulips makes me think I need to find a good way to add colour to these. These palettes STANK! I think they may be MDF and I shouldn't be burning that. Or at least not without a ventilator.

These last ones are acacia wood coasters that I've turned into wall hangings and were a bit different. Acacia is a darker and harder wood so I couldn't do super fine detail or shading. But I had fun working with the natural shapes in the wood.

The toadstool's underside and stem were already in the wood grain and a bit lighter than the rest of the wood. I lightened it more with water colour pencils. The red is sharpie.

These orchids (? Are they orchids?) I coloured by tinting linseed oil. It took a LOT more pigment than I expected and wasn't as precise as I'd like.

This dancer I did because the natural colour variations in the wood looked like a stage and spotlights. It's not as pretty and picturey but I really like it.

Sorry the photos are terrible.