A little Further Progress with "Horse" Pyrography

I have progressed a little with the Horse pyrography and now have to darken the right hand side from the mane down to the bottom of the neck. When this is complete I can work on the dark background area. The background will be extended on the Left hand side up to the height of the horses right hand blinker where it will be faded to the natural wood colour or perhaps I'll terminate the shaded potion with a soft focus tree line.

I started to fill in the dark background area before finishing the horse's neck partly to see how dark I would need to go there, but also, this is really the main reason, I was demonstrating pyrography with this piece at the Trend Timbers stand at the Hawkesbury Agricultural Show where one of the woodcraft groups I belong to; 'Hawkesbury Woodcraft Cooperative', was manning the stand to promote woodcrafts. Where we were located a cool but intermittent breeze made the pyrography tool only intermittently predictable in its darkening effect on the timber. So I chose to work on an area where I could use a a larger shading nib and on an area where I could go back in later to make tonal adjustments.

I suspect many decisions in art and craft work, plus other human exploits as well, can sometimes be simply explained by the comfort, convenience, peculiar circumstances or other contingent effects that happened to present themselves at the time of design or making. Then well after the event, if they leave some identifiable presence in the completed work, they end up being seen as a part of the design that can be read as having significant meaning.

Most of the time your work should be careful and deliberate with purpose in everything you do. But sometimes you just blunder along, at other times just plain blunder. The thing is to reign in the mishaps and blunders and make something positive come out of them all the while learning to work better whenever you can.

When I have this piece complete I will need to build a frame for it and then see if I can get the 'Dragon Carving' completed by the beginning of June. Then I intend to concentrate on lovespoons for a while.