Tips and Tricks

• In burning fish and reptile scales, use a pen that allows you to see what you are doing. Some pens cover the scales you are burning, making it difficult to see where to place the pen for the next scale.
  
  
• If you are a flat pyrographer (in other words, one who burns pictures on wood) and you use the dot method, you can control the shading gradients. If you use one of the pens in the 7 or 8 series of pens for shading, you will find there are soft spots and hard spots caused by the grain in the wood that makes this process difficult. The soft spots burn easier and darker, while the hard spots burn lighter. This causes a difference in degree of brown and does not look good. If you use the dot method use the point of a pen such as the 1 series (1-A, 1-B or 1-C), 3-A, or the 10 series. Reverse the pen so the point is the only part that touches the wood. The closer and more numerous you make the dots, the darker it appears. The lesser the amount and sparser the dots, the shading appears lighter.
  
  
• If you have been using a "soldering iron" type of burning pen because you like the heat retention in the copper tip, try our copper tip pens that you can use with your Detail Master Control Unit.

If you have any questions or burning problems, please contact Robert (Bob) Boyer at pyrographer@msn.com and I will try to help you out.