Gourd Pyrography

A guide to gourd pyrography--using heat to create works of gourd art--that discusses gourd prep and work basics, provides step-by-step instructions for several designs and techniques, and presents secrets from fifty artists.

Gourds -- with their infinite variety of unusual shapes and sizes, and their smooth surfaces -- have provided a perfect canvas for artists in the American Southwest over many years. It's easy to carve, paint, and stain them, and add embellishments like beads and feathers. These beautiful projects, including rainsticks, masks, and bowls, reflect the traditional designs, techniques, and colors that are indigenous to this region.

Provides examples from twenty artists along with information on their tools, methods, and influences.

Although it is often referred to as woodburning, the art of pyrography can be worked on just about any natural surface, including gourds, leather, or cotton rag paper. Now Lora Irish, the author of the bestselling Great Book of Woodburning, offers thirty-five amazingly detailed new projects that explore the craft of pyrography across the full range of inventive pyro media. Inside her new book, readers will learn the basics of pyrography systems, tools, supplies and practice boards. Differences between the various substrates are examined and discussed, including both wood and non-wood working surfaces. Irish provides expert advice on temperature settings, fill patterns, hand positions, textures, stroke patterns and more. Chapters are included on creating tonal values, understanding shadows, adding color to your burnings, and finishing the work. Thirty-five new patterns illustrate the application of fine pyrography across a wide variety of imaginative media, including vegetable tanned leather, dried gourds, cotton fabric, artist paper, chipboard and papier-mâché. Irish is known for her amazingly detailed patterns that positively exude expression, and this book does not disappoint. Each fascinating project includes complete instructions plus photographs of both the finished piece and the work-in-progress across pale, medium, dark and detailed stages.

Jim Widess and Ginger Summit, the best-selling authors of The Complete Book of Gourd Craft and Making Gourd Instruments, have done it again: they’ve produced another winner to delight the many crafters who work with gourds. Large, lavish, and astonishingly comprehensive, this breathtaking volume introduces every tool and every technique associated with gourd carving, offers fabulous projects that advance in difficulty, and presents a gallery of works designed to inspire. See how to choose and prepare a gourd, impress the surface with a design, and work with green gourds. The magnificent methods of decorative carving covered include fretwork, engraving, chip carving, carving with gouges, relief carving, inlay, and deep relief or sculptural carving. Throughout, color photographs of exquisite carved gourds present crafts styles from countries around the world. A Selection of the Crafters Choice Book Club.

This handsome hardcover gift book makes woodburning easy by walking beginners through all the basics of materials, tools, and techniques. Seven skill-building pyrography projects provide step-by-step exercises in using temperature, time, layering, and texturing to create artistic tonal values.

Written by an internationally-known artist and craftswoman with several best-selling titles in pyrography, woodcarving, and other craft hobbies, Lora Irish Provides step-by-step instructions for each art styles, from engraving and cross hatching to pointillism and realism Includes 31 samples of finished samples and line art A comprehensive guide for all the major styles used in pyrography