I was having a late night discussion with several people in a discord server about a week ago, we were talking about various art projects. The subject of woodburners came up and we were talking about our past woodburner art work. That got me to thinking about some of the things that I've done with a woodburner pen and I was going to write a post about it at that time, but other distractions got in the way. I finally remembered the subject and decided to write this post today. It seems to make sense to write about it now, with the new creative coin having come out on steem engine. So here's a look at a couple of different woodburner projects that I've done in the past couple of years. This is the first time that I've written about these projects on steem.
This first piece is a basic zodiac chart that I burned into a round piece of craft wood, the kind that you get from the hobby and craft store. The disk is about 7 inches in diameter. I basically did a google picture search at the time for various zodiac charts to look at, and then drew this design out on the piece of wood with a pencil. Then I took the woodburner pen and traced the pencil marks to burn the design into the wood. I have it hanging on my wall now.
Most of my woodburner projects have been metaphysical subjects, I tend to hang around the "woo woo" crowd a lot, so those subjects appeal to me. This next project is a good example of that. These are what I call oracle dice. Some people refer to them as "witch dice" or divination dice, but I prefer the term oracle dice for the ones that I've made. I've made several sets of these and sold a couple of sets at a metaphycal gathering that happens every year on the second weekend in August up in the Keweenaw peninsula. This is my personal set of dice. I drew the symbols on the faces of the dice with a pencil, and then burned them into the wood. I cut the squares of wood from a piece of curly maple that I had available. These dice are about 1 inch square and have symbols on 4 sides, with 2 opposing sides blank. Each symbol has a specific meaning for doing an oracle reading. As you will probably notice, some of the symbols are based on rune symbols.
Speaking of runes, I've done several sets of runes on slices of tree branch that I cut myself. For some sets, I've used dry apple wood branches, and for others I've used dry willow branches. The reason for specific types of wood is that different types of wood have different specific metaphysical properties. I've only used the woodburner pen to make 1 set of runes. I had been carving the symbols into the wood with a hobby knife and using a red fine tip marker to color in the symbol after it's carved. With the woodburner, you don't need to color the symbols, the burner tip creates the color for the symbol. The runes I've made are based on the Elder Futhark.
I gave away the set of runes that I burned, so I can't show you those, but here's one of the sets that I carved the symbols into.
I haven't used the woodburner in about a year, but I've been thinking about getting it out again to make something with. I just haven't figured out what I want to make with it yet. I'm guessing that something will inspire me at some point.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
