Details, details

Woodburning the veins into the leaf.

We recognize a leaf by more than its shape. There’s veining and color as well. Time to add those things.

I could see the veins clearly in the original photo, so I added them with pyrography—burning freehand sweeping curves into the wood with the skew-chisel-shaped handpiece you see in the photo. I kept the heat relatively low, about 4 on a scale of ten, so lines would stay narrow and sharp with minimal charring of the surrounding wood.

Coloring with water-based dye.

Once I was satisfied with the veining, I laid down an overall color wash using water-based dye. Since the background color of the leaf in the photo seemed to be yellow, I used W.D. Lockwood’s Canary Yellow dye. This is a water-soluble powder that I mix up and keep in concentrated form in squeeze bottles. Then, when I need some for a project such as this, I dilute the concentrate with distilled water. I like to keep the dye a bit weak, since I can always put on more coats to get a stronger color, but it’s a little harder to evenly remove too strong a color. In the photo, I’ve stained half the leaf so you can see the effect relative to bare wood.

The leaf with veins and background color, ready for accent colors.

Water-based dyes raise the grain, so I lightly sanded with my final grit (#220) to cut off the whiskers between coats.

At left you can see the leaf as it looked on the drying mat when this stage was complete. Note that the branch area, at about 2:30 in the picture, took the dye differently from the rest of the plate. This would also be an issue later, when time came to apply a finish.

Next, adding detail colors.