okay so here we are we're gonna do I guess my third You-tube presentation of
a pyrography project what I'm showing you here is my second one and the first
one that I video there is at the bottom and I'm showing you my reference
material we're gonna do apis mellifera again which is the honeybee there she is
dead center up there and this honeybee is going to be a guard bee I have the
Poly color pencils here if I decide to color it in with oil-based pencils and
there's the sharpener that I just got
and carbon paper you want to get full sheets of carbon paper so that you can
lay out your initial rendering and this is the razor tip power pack here that
we're gonna run on our burner tips from these things are really nice if you
notice I have seven tips now so we're gonna experiment with some other tips
the last ones I did I only used three different tips got my village Victorian
bed-and-breakfast coffee cup they're from Morrisville Vermont and this is the
wood panel it's from a deep box mann lake makes it this is their intermediate
quality they have one better and quality level that's worse and about my
little worker bee here but she's a guard Bee as you can see she's raising up and
her four limbs are in the air ready to grab interlopers so I thought this would
be an interesting project that's plenty big this is a side panel
again I don't know if I said that and we'll put this box together after we
finish burning this image on it
there's lots of stray marks and stuff on it and it's just just the way it came in
the box here and we're probably gonna start out by burning the head here you
start with your high cuz it's gonna be the darkest area don't get overly
detailed with your initial sketch just make sure you've got the parameters in
the shape and kind of the attitude of everything down right you can do a
pencil sketch first and then trace your final sketch through graphite paper
which is erasable this is graphite paper that came with the razor tip package I
have not used it yet that's a pretty large sheet so I'm sticking with the
eight-and-a-half by eleven these are the four tips I'm going to be using the
ballpoint the Arrowhead shader there and the round flat shader and the knife
blade at the top I'm gonna start with the ball tip here
and you're just gonna start outlining the eye and of course we're starting with
the darkest part of the illustration and then we'll work dark to light and notice
I've outlined the highlight on the eye and you don't want to touch that because
what we're gonna do is we're gonna darken everything around the highlight
areas and that will make them even more prominent so we'll do a little scumbling
here which is just a bunch of random circles that start to build up the
values or we could go into just making contour lines which follow the shape
that we're trying to convince people that the eye has you could do the whole
thing with contour lines if you wanted to I think on this one we're just gonna
do the eyes and maybe the legs with contour lines and that would make it
look interesting and unusual and again make sure and don't run any marks into
that highlight that's why you want to outline those when you're doing your
layout here and these are the antennae and when you're picking an image to do
you could get something that has simplified images already like you could
get pages from a coloring book there are lots of nature coloring books for
example and then you could pick one of those pages put a graphite sheet under
it and outline that right on to your box or a piece of wood and then use
pyrography to finish it in any way you like and or you can freehand stuff I
don't recommend free handing when you're gonna be burning the wood because every
mark you make is gonna be there it's not like you can just lightly sketch in and
build it up although that may be a neat effect unto itself but you probably want
to come up with a simpler outline that's pretty pretty much what you want so
we're gonna work on the mandible here
and someone recently asked me on youtube if honeybees have teeth well this is
kind of the closest thing to it they have their mandibles here that they they
pinch with and they drag drones out with and they shape honeycomb with it and
they bite their enemies and they bite people sometimes and it's the closest
thing to teeth that they have
we've come back and revisit the eye here and just keep working it up darkening
things as we go and then the darker we make the eyes and the legs and things
like that the lighter of course the hair and other parts of the body will appear
and now we'll do a little pointillism just because it's fun to create an image
with dots depending on how long you hold it in one spot and how much you push it
in the larger deeper darker the dots will be and these eyes are very
interesting anyway when you look at them up close even though they're shiny and
appear smooth you'll see that they have compound eyes with lots of little facets
in them
and we'll just keep burning it up here get over here on the bee's knees look at
all the moisture that's rising out of the there's pine sap coming up out of
this pox which is actually kind of cool because it boils and sizzles here under
the tip but then as soon as I move the heat away it sets up so it's like an
instant varnish kind of of pine sap
I thinking we're just gonna keep following what you think the contour is
that that leg would be you know make this be like distinctive and somewhat
dramatic and since she's the defender of the hive we want her to look dramatic and
kind of like she could take on anything
give her lots of power it's kind of looking cool I think I'm gonna start to
work in these hind legs here
and it really if you're gonna do artwork of something like a bee that has lots of
intricate parts and textures is a great way to further your understanding of
their Anatomy and appreciate really how interesting
their design is and how functional they are when you have to sketch or draw and
in this case use pyrography for something you're really going to get a
better understanding of and appreciation for all the parts of the bee
and remember this is a guard be and guard bees do just what the name says
they card the colony they might be found on the landing board or at the entry
reducer and you'll see them momentarily grab every bee or touch every bee or
smell every bee as it comes in from the field and other guard bees are inside
the colony kind of running around in groups checking up on everyone and if
something doesn't smell right or somebody doesn't belong they will run
them right out and they do that by biting initially and then stinging if
they have to I'm showing a pretty low angle here to kind of showcase how
deeply embossed the surface of the wood is for this method so when you're using
pyrography you're really burning a physical indentation as well as
darkening the wood it's very interesting
we're looking at the fore limbs look how shiny they are because again the SAP
rose up out of the wood and then reset close up to the four limbs here how
intricate they are I think it's looking pretty good
I like the contour lines as a way of defining the the legs the antennae the
mandibles and now we're gonna go to the blade which is what we're gonna use to
lay in all the hairs here the ball point would be just too thick for that purpose
and in the areas where you see the SAP rising out there it takes a lot more
heat and a lot more time to darken the wood there but the effect is interesting
and unexpected you can't really plan on that kind of moisture being in the wood
but I can't say I'm mad about it it's creating some interesting texture and
glossyness here
then we're coming along these light hairs that are underneath the head of
the bee and you can be as detailed as you want or you can cut back and just do
simple outlines of where you think the hair line would be there's no way to mess it
up again you can just have fun with it it's still going to be a bee box no
matter what you do to it so it is functional art
and these tips I guess for making hairs this is about the best tool you can turn
it over here and do it with the backside of it but doesn't seem to work as well
as when you're using the long edge but you know what a bee's body is composed
of a long and short hairs fine hairs and thick hairs and some are soft and some
are rigid and there's that it's hard to get a dark mark here
and we have the dial turned up to about a six and a half
now I don't know what my next project is gonna be but I guess I've done the
regular worker bee now we're doing this guard bee maybe the next one will be a
forager that's coming in with a bunch of pollen on its hind leg or something like
that that looks pretty cool I'm satisfied with the the shape of the
lengths we'll just build them up make them a little darker here but the thorax
is shaped up well the fuzz on the head is good just a close-up here to show you
where we're coming from we still have some darkening to do and a lot of
shading to do but the hairs and shape is pretty convincing I think so far just
keep working up the contours and look how dark I made the joint they're high
contrast this is the key to creating a dramatic image on the box you know we're
a little higher than a six here I do like these tools because you can swap
them out they cool down fast so you just unplug one plug in another
and get right back into it so you can swap tools as often as you like it's
it's a very handy kit I have to say
putting some legs here her hairs on the legs these are the hind legs you know
kind of paddle shape that is these are the hind legs where the pollen would be
stored if this became a foraging Bee right now it's a guard bee you won't see any
pollen on her but the hairs on their hind legs there will be super stiff and
they'll actually be kind of curved better than I'm showing here where they
would be designed to hold the pollen and all these little hairs around the joints
and stuff very interesting if you haven't really looked at bee's feet up
close I recommend you do it because it's impressive the number of joints and how
how delicate they really look it's amazing the amount of work they do with
them we're back up here on the abdomen just adding some patches of hair we're
gonna do most of the work on the abdomen through shading and not so much with
hair work ups and there it is this looking pretty good and now I have this
little shading iron trying it out for the first time cranked it up to six and
a half almost seven because it's a lot of metal and I want to do some shading
there so much moisture it's coming out of the wood here that it's almost
impossible to darken it the way I want to
I'm gonna give it a try but when there's a lot of moisture present like that it
creates an interesting finish but it really is preventing me from burning it
as dark as I need it to be come back and visit the eye here I don't know this iron
it's pretty thick this shading piece I've seen people do entire pyrography
works with it on YouTube I've looked at some other channels but I'm probably
gonna shift over to one of the more flat shaders so I can try it out
these tools are new to me so I'm actually testing it on my actual project
which is probably not a great idea you want to probably test it out and just
scrap pieces of wood that you're not going to use but I don't think we'll ruin it
here's another shader that I got the spoon shader I'm gonna see how that goes
and we'll crank up the electricity here a little bit and it's okay
kinda makes a dark Center
probably have the heat a little too high here is a lot of smoke coming off you
can back that down a little
and I've shifted now to a flat shader we're doing the wings you can put little
tiny dots on wings they have that I'm just gonna shade it in to indicate them
and there's the whole picture I think I'm gonna kind of abandon this project
now I think that's where I'm gonna leave it looks like a Bee contour lines are okay
did not cast a shadow someone didn't like that on the last one and I'm just
gonna sign my name here and I hope you come up with maybe a wood burning
project of your own or some way of customizing your beeboxes and maybe
you'll do a YouTube and share what your ideas were I don't know what my next
project will be but I appreciate those of you who are watching and that wanted
these tutorials it's kind of a new territory here for my youtube channel
but I'm definitely happy to burn the Bee boxes for you and share how I do it and
what I choose so there's the whole thing so this will be the side of the deep box
and we'll probably put some kind of urethane coating on it to protect it
against the weather you will see how it goes thanks for watching